Word: woyzeck
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...COULD ACCUSE Gregg Lachow and the other makers of Woyzeck of getting inadvertantly lost in mainstage space. They are in love with it. Stepping inside, the audience ventures almost shyly onto a vast Siberian wasteland, its cellophane spaces crackling with emptiness, its border indistinct. Mountains of some synthetic material rim the flatness of every available inch of the hall's acres of aisle and plank; throughout the production, unexpected portions of this flatness rise and fall, thrusting the landscape of events into strange non-Euclidean configurations. A friend of the production has advanced the hypothesis that Lachow conceived the whole...
...prominently heralded on the programs, perhaps to forestall suspicions of yet another strange modern experiment), he neglected to finish or polish his work, arrange the scenes in any particular order, or denote a beginning, middle or end. With no setting, no scene transitions and no unified plot. Woyzeck would seem--if it takes place anywhere--to unroll in the center of a cavernous emptiness. So it does at the Loeb, but this emptiness has substance and tangible form...
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...
...Woyzeck, the first experiment in modern tragedy, remains primitive in form, failing to satisfy the emotions with which it struggles. And the hesitant quality of the Quincy House production offers little to resolve the unpolished ambiguities of the text. But the stark direction releases the force of the conflicts involved, and sometimes that's enough...