Word: buchner
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...neither will Marcus Stern's production of Woyzeck at the American Repertory Theater. Based on a series of fragments by the German playwright, Georg Buchner, the work was hailed as the first truly modern play when it first appeared on stage, some eighty years after it had been written in 1836. The last work Buchner worked on before he died of influenza at twenty-three, the collection of vignettes was performed to great success in 1913 in Germany. The stark Woyzeck diagnosed and condemned the nation's sick soul at a time characterized by psychoanalysis and introspection...
...even if Buchner's vignettes themselves are unconventional, director Marcus Stern refuses to leave them alone. Sped up to the pace of an action movie, Gideon Lester's new translation of Woyzeck is as beaten and pushed around as its title character. The ART warps and distorts any semblance of coherence within the play. The production races through over twenty-five scenes in under sixty minutes, scarcely allowing the audience to breathe, let alone to analyze or reflect. Woyzeck (Thomas Derrah) drops through trap-doors, dashes up ladders and circles the stage. Scene changes resemble film cuts; music clips...
...play itself makes such unusual demands of a director that a sweeping, radical interpretation seems called for. When George Buchner wrote the "script" in 1837 (as is 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...
...gaps in a script which at times seem one big gap do not 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...
...free kick set up the booters' only tally of the contest as Andreas Keller-Sarmiento lofted a pass from ten yards outside the left corner of the penalty area, which Lance Aryault, moving in from the right side, headed over Buchner and into the Tufts goal...