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Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan's
sensuous melodies and sardonic lyrics envelop the fractured shards
of Georg Büchner's unfinished script to create riveting theater
in the "Woyzeck" that opened Friday at Shotgun Players'
Ashby Stage. Director Mark Jackson blends their talents with those
of his company to deliver one of the most exciting productions
of the year.
This is a "Woyzeck" that's as emotionally compelling
as it is intellectually stimulating and mordantly comic, which
is a major achievement. Büchner's prescient drama, which
the 24-year-old German radical was still writing when he died
in 1837, has had a huge influence on modern drama in the many
scripts (and Alban Berg's opera) later cobbled from his jumbled
manuscripts. But few stagings of the tale of the common soldier
who murdered his lover (based on a true story) attain the immediacy
of this one.
Partly that's because of the restrained, almost offhand emotional
intensity in the acting and singing of Alex Crowther's Woyzeck,
Madeline H.D. Brown as his lover Marie and the rest of Jackson's
almost perfect cast. But the show's impact also derives from how
well the director builds on the genius of his predecessors.
Visionary director Robert Wilson had the idea of uniting the gritty,
sardonic visions of Büchner and Waits, Wilson's collaborator
on "Black Rider." Wilson pared down the script with
adapter-translators Ann-Christin Rommen and Wolfgang Wiens to
a crisp, concentrated libretto with a tight focus on the paranoid
Woyzeck's borderline sanity cracking under the strain of military
life, poverty, medical experiments and Marie's infidelity. Waits
and his wife, Brennan, draw on Büchner's text to fill out
the tale's heart as well as its worldview.
Jackson eschews Wilson's allusive symbolist stagings for a more
grounded, presentational style on the grungy tiers of Nina Ball's
dramatically telescoped set. Together with musical director-keyboardist
David Möschler and his terrific Bob Starving and the Whalers
quintet's new orchestrations (Waits' originals can be heard on
his "Blood Money" album), the fourth-wall-busting format
delivers the excitement of a Brecht-Weill musical of the "Threepenny
Opera" era.
Beth Wilmurt sets the tone with the matter-of-fact delivery of
her brightly crooned "Misery's the River of the World,"
as the watchful camp follower Margaret. Crowther invests Woyzeck
with a frightening intensity, whether bedeviled by the score's
paranoid fantasies, resisting the party-hearty camaraderie of
Kenny Toll's tuneful Andres or simply frozen in action.
Brown is tantalizingly distant and heartrending as Marie, generating
distinct degrees of edgy eroticism with Crowther on "Coney
Island Baby" and with Joe Estlack's predatory Drum Major.
Estlack stops the show with a pitch-perfect rasp and serpentine
break dance-tango moves on "Another Man's Vine," as
does Kevin Clarke's wild-eyed Doctor, warbling "bacteria"
on "God's Away on Business."
New melodic riches keep popping up, evoking blues and big-band
gems of yore. The music draws us into the biting wit of the lyrics
and humanizes the characters, making Büchner's dark tale
as seductive as it is potently immediate.
