Word: woyzeck
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...opening scene of the ART's latest production, a boorish captain implores his barber-orderly, Johann Christian Woyzeck, to slow down while shaving him: "Not so fast, one thing after another. You're making me quite dizzy." The orderly, a fidgety and anxious troll of a man, paces back and forth in the spotlight, etching out the confines of the circle. Surrounded by darkness, he nervously darts to his washbowl and glances out into the audience with a fearful and ominous visage. Woyzeck cannot and will not slow down...
...neither will Marcus Stern's production of Woyzeck at the American Repertory Theater. Based on a series of fragments by the German playwright, Georg Buchner, the work was hailed as the first truly modern play when it first appeared on stage, some eighty years after it had been written in 1836. The last work Buchner worked on before he died of influenza at twenty-three, the collection of vignettes was performed to great success in 1913 in Germany. The stark Woyzeck diagnosed and condemned the nation's sick soul at a time characterized by psychoanalysis and introspection...
...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...
...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...