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Georg Büchner's Woyzeck
is a nihilistic tale of the miseries of 19th-century poverty and
class inequality. It's a story of a man so downtrodden that, without
its theatricality, would be a total downer. But Robert Wilson's
2002 version incorporates music and lyrics by Tom Waits (and his
wife Kathleen Brennan), whose singular style of junkyard jazz
gives adds comic cynicism to Büchner's uncompleted play.
Songs titles such as "Misery Is the River of the World,"
"Everything Goes to Hell," and "God's Away on Business"
pretty much say it all.
In The Shotgun Players'
top-notch production of Wilson's Woyzeck, director Mark
Jackson injects a hipster grunge aesthetic to this desolate, hope-dashing
farce. Alex Crowther plays Woyzeck, a young man struggling to
provide for his lover, Marie (Madeline H. D. Brown), and their
child. He takes various odd jobs, dependent on the meager wages
from his selfish and erratically behaving superiors. When he shaves
a portly, military captain (Anthony Nemirovsky), he's instructed
to replace the shaving cream with whipped cream so the gluttonous
Captain can lick his own face. He's also paid to be a guinea pig
in a wacko medical experiment for which he must eat only peas.
Disheveled and desperate, Woyzeck stands at attention, subjecting
himself to prodding and apologizing for peeing anywhere else but
in the doctor's cup.
Woyzeck's heartless employers
are cartoonishly menacing. Nemirovsky's Captain is a nasty hedonist
— think Newman from Seinfeld, but with unbridled power.
As The Doctor, Kevin Clarke is delightfully bizarre. He has the
unhinged manner of a mad scientist, with a shock of Albert Einstein
hair. Clarke's edgy unpredictability makes the doctor both menacing
and hysterical. As he seizes Woyzeck for his maniacal purposes,
The Doctor sings, "I'd sell your heart to the junkman baby,
for a buck, for a buck." Like an indentured backup singer,
Woyzeck chimes in with his horror-stricken falsetto in a single
drawn-out out word: bacteria. It is a masterful duet of terror
and cruelty.
The songs that make up most
of the play were later recorded on Waits' 2002 album Blood
Money. But the album doesn't get near the power of the songs
as they are integrated into Jackson's adaptation. On record, the
songs are sung only with Waits' pulverized baritone and clamorous
orchestrations. It's more weird and harsh than affecting.
But under David Möschler's
musical direction, the music in this adaptation captures the characters'
desperation, deceit, and numbness. If there's one thing you can
say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man, the cast sings.
The music — played
on everything from a tuba to a toy piano, a vibraphone, and a
filing cabinet — is fraught with discord and chaos. There
are assaulting percussions, ironic waltzes, lively big-band jazz,
deceptively tender ballads, and sarcastic upbeat numbers.
Beth Wilmurt deftly conveys
the dead-inside human condition as Margaret, a cynical hooker
in a red wig. Looming above on the stage's scaffolding, she sings
in a numb staccato.
Together with Marie, she
performs "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." On Blood
Money, Waits makes the song work, but it's far more meaningful
here, sung by fallen women.
Brown is convincing as Marie,
a sexy East Village hipster in a seedy retro kitchen, who silently
offers McDonald's French fries to Woyzeck and watches her infant
with tenderness and futility. She takes the crumpled bills that
her devoted Woyzeck puts on the table, but her head is turned
by the dashing Drum Major, played with impeccable hilarity by
Joe Estlack. In his shiny military duds, he peacocks around her
— performing an absurd mating ritual that incorporates a
moonwalk and other Michael Jackson flourishes.
On Nina Ball's set, you
can nearly see the grease on the walls, the piss in the pots.
Christine Crook's costume designs playfully demonstrate the haves
and the have-nots.
The Drum Major's conquest
and his taunting of Woyzeck strip our proletariat hero of the
last vestiges of his humanity. The wind sings to him stab stab
dead. Marie sings to the baby: Nothing's ever yours to keep/Close
your eyes, go to sleep.
In Jackson's smart and dynamic
production, looking into the abyss was never so enjoyable.
