Word: woyzeck
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Having seen several recent productions of Georg Buechner's cryptic drama Woyzeck, I still cannot understand the fascination it holds for young directors. Buechner died at 23 in 1837. He left behind, among other writings, a jumbled, partly illegible manuscript of an unfinished play based on the real-life case of Johann Christian Woyzeck, an army barber executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress. The order of scenes in this manuscript is indeterminate; some scenes are mere fragments. The ending of the play is unclear. The dialogue in both the German original and most translations borders on psychotic...
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...
Peter Weil as the Drum Major and Carl Nagin as Woyzeck's friend Andres work in their parts more out of physical presence than anything else. Mayer has, on occasion, underdirected his actors: Nagin seems to be playing more to himself than to Babe, and James Shuman's monologue sounds more like an exercise in dialogue modulation than the barroom philosophy it should...