Word: woyzeck
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Dates: during 1966-1966
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...forbid Woyzeck should be Tim Mayer's last show at Harvard. Still, if it is, he's ended his extra-curricular career with a hit, and made the first season of the Harvard Summer School Players all the more memorable...
...Mayer's Woyzeck is a veritable diamond in the rough: the set looks unfinished, the lighting is often unfortunately absent, the stage hands scramble conspicuously for the props during scene transitions, sometimes the actors don't seem aware that other actors are on stage with them. But it doesn't matter. When all is said and done, Woyzeck is an exciting and a fascinating show, one which transcends its technical handicaps easily. The best in it is Mayer's best and that's saying plenty...
...Woyzeck itself is a 19th century tragedy by George Buchner. Although many of the lines and the occurrences in its twenty-nine scenes are ambiguous and open to varied interpretation, it's pretty clear that Buchner was a social critic who didn't like what society was doing to mankind. Woyzeck himself is the guinea pig used by the characters Buchner hated: most specifically, the army represented by a vicous and stupid Captain, and misguided science, represented by a hack doctor. Because of economic pressure, Woyzeck must allow himself to be exploited in order to live. His sanity rests...
Making its U.S. debut in Manhattan, Munich's Bavarian State Theater performs Woyzeck in German (simultaneous translations available) with brilliant fidelity of tone-stark, spare and stinging. Into a landscape of damnation walks Woyzeck, a simple soldier, poor, puzzled, and haunted by voices and apparitions. To eke out his army pay he becomes a guinea pig for a medical fanatic who puts him on a diet of nothing but peas and exhibits him to his students, an experiment no less dehumanizing for being silly. Woyzeck's firmest hold on life is a woman (Elisabeth Orth) who has borne...
...plot is not the point. Buechner was concerned with destiny, not destinations, and Woyzeck, sensitively played by Heinrich Schweiger, is a lyric dirge to bruised humanity. The play is as durable and compassionate as the line that might have served as its epigraph: "Every man is an abyss, and you get dizzy looking into...