Word: woyzeck
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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John Lithgow, who directs the present production, played the Doctor in a Woyzeck at Princeton this summer, and the Harvard Dramatic Club staged another Woyzeck right here in Cambridge this August. The current one does little to ease my own reservations about Buechner's so-called masterpiece...
...admirer of Lithgow's work in Harvard theatre, I am both surprised and pained to have to list a number of serious defects in his latest effort. Let me say, however, that there is much good in this Woyzeck (including Ken Tigar's free translation) and much that sparkles with directorial ingenuity. But there is also much that is bad--obviously bad--and if it is not the director's fault directly, it is still his responsibility...
...First, Woyzeck, is cursed by some very bad acting. Paul Balmuth, the lead, has not much business being on the Loeb mainstage. His range of expressiveness is disastrously limited; his voice is pathetically inadequate; his mosquito-like dartings back and forth across the stage grow quite irritating after a while. When he plays to his mistress, Marie, he looks and acts like a little boy; with the Doctor, he seems completely unconcerned to be the victim of a deranged experimenter; with the Drum Major (when he ought to be dead drunk, incidentally, and not stone sober...
...kills most of the excitement of Lithgow's wonderfully staged crowd scenes. The music is strange, not, I suspect, completely because it was composed that way. The pace of many big scenes (all of those in the inn, for example) is nowhere near the feverish tempo that should drive Woyzeck to final destruction. And the timing of small bits is often fuzzy, so that Woyzeck's knifing of Marie, for instance, is only feebly chilling...
...sure some of these failures will be corrected tonight. I wish all of them could be, for Woyzeck, despite its ambiguity and confusion can make an interesting evening's entertainment...