Woyzeck Takes You Down the Rathole
Imagine paying just $20 to be herded into the ramshackle Odd Duck Studio on Pike, with its secondhand seats, to stare at a set consisting of a few scrap boards nailed together, and watch a one-act about a plausibly schizophrenic German soldier laboring under crushing poverty, abused by authority, who discovers his mistress is cheating on him and snaps. Also, the cast wears little white masks and occasionally songs are sung in the vicinity of their key.
Got that? Just as thought experiment, what would it take to get you there? No, honestly. (We know a few of you are dying to see it on the basis of it sounding so off-putting.)
Eclectic Theatre's production of Woyzeck (Thurday-Monday through March 14, tickets $20) isn't a successful evening of theatre, even by fringe standards. The play is very big in Germany (this is an adaptation by Beau Prichard, translated by Keeley Alexander), but here in the U.S. it has flourished more in college settings. Last Friday night in the Odd Duck there were more people onstage than in the audience.
This isn't to say there's nothing good about this Woyzeck. As the lead, Patrick Bentley is disturbingly unmoored--either adrift in an ambitionless fog or seized by apocalyptic vision--and is fully committed to the character's belief in his disjunctive reality. Woyzeck's individual pathology is mirrored by his drinking buddy Andrei (Julian Rios III), who wanders drunkenly down the line that separates the sane from insane, keeping a slight self-awareness, a fearfulness of looking crazy, like Woyzeck.
As directed by L. Nicol Cabe, the play does generate a queasily off-kilter reality, and you can make an argument that the Brechtian distancing devices are psychologically effective here--schizophrenics (as we armchair-diagnose Woyzeck) do display flat or discoordinated affect and can view others as less-than-real, 2-D characters. The lighting design by Stephen Bauman shoulders the bulk of the work in shifting between scenes and establishing mood.
But given the grim nature of the play, its incompletion by playwright Georg Buchner, and its 160-year performance history, its presentation requires more talent than Eclectic Theatre can throw at it (though the original music by Mai Li Pittard has a raffish charm). The magnitude and reality (the story was "ripped from the headlines" of its day) of the suffering on display overwhelms the capacity of the cast and the theatre's resources, until you are as aware of their struggle as you are of the original drama.
