Word: woyzeck
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Othelo, who starred 40 years ago in Orson Welles' unfinished film It's All True, is the wrinkled old retainer of one of Fitz's broken dreams. And steering the vessel through precarious waters is Klaus Kinski, once the psychotic stalker of Herzog's Aguirre, Woyzeck and Nosferatu, now a Kodachrome picture of the imperialist as jolly fantast. It is one of the many odd pleasures of Fitzcarraldo to watch Kinski's 80 or so teeth, which are usually forged into a vampire's carnivorous sneer, here forged into the semblance of a Teddy...
Empty space, in fact, becomes one of the focal points for this strange succession of happenings, lending the voyage from scene to scene more excitement, more obvious purpose, than the scenes themselves. The latter do seem in fact to concern a a man named Woyzeck (the name rings repetitively through the various modes of address, a ghostly refrain), a soldier, who has been forced to eat nothing but peas for months in the interests of science. Who shaves his Captain's beard daily in return for disjointed grilling on philosophy and morals. Who kills a woman...
...interfere with the production's authoritative, screne flow towards a goal that, though a mystery to the watcher, clearly exists for those on stage. All but the most sophisticated audiences--say, those who have read Buchner and his theories and went to see Lachow's earlier Woyzeck on Exhibit at the Ex--may find themselves frustrated if they try to guess at precisely what Lachow and Co. think this goal...
...show seems rather a moot question; the debate this spring may be waged in the Loeb box office, but presumably no audience reserves the right to be conventionally enthralled or illuminated, as long as a production can pique the senses and stay uneasily in the mind as do Woyzeck's visually masterful sequences. The way Jamie Hanes, as Woyzeck, stares defeatedly at a surrealistically huge bowl of peas, munches some, then bows his head in acceptance and dread, carries its power with it; marooned in cellophone wastes with his huge silhouette thrown on a scrim, Hanes need not operate otherwise...
...astounding lighting design by Jon Monderer does more than any other one element to give Lachow's spaces their sinuous magic. Rimming a long swing that sweeps a child in and out of view, shining up through two rectangular-grills to denote barracks for Woyzeck and a comrade. Monderer's lights and shadows and hellish pink sunsets need no narrative to make them shocking. Now and then they steal the center of attention completely, and Woyzeck becomes a story told entirely in light, without words, an aural equivalent of the children's show Laserium. Words here do not tell, they...