Murder, insanity, sex and a robotic monkey had the crowd
standing in applause last night at the premiere of
“Woyzeck,” which will run through Dec. 15 at the Freud
Playhouse.
Nowhere this side of the madhouse or a gonzo acid trip have you
seen chaos organized with such stunning color, murder enacted so
tenderly, nervous breakdowns played out with potent, demented
logic. To put it simply, it rocked.
Although the original text on which “Woyzeck” is
based lends the story of a soldier who goes insane and murders his
girlfriend, Robert Wilson’s version is very much an original
piece. In fact, Wilson’s transformation of the play into a
surreal, carnivalesque musical creates a largely new text from the
lyrics and musical personality of Tom Waits.
Those already familiar with Waits’ music will immediately
recognize the original mark of the artist’s vision. To watch
Wilson’s “Woyzeck,” is like seeing the musical
eccentricities of such albums as “Swordfishtrombones,”
“Rain Dogs,” and the Grammy-winning “Mule
Variations” stumble into electrifying art on-stage.
For newcomers to Waits, it is best to imagine a late-night jam
session during Mardi Gras and the drunken, fumbling exhaustion of
extremely-skilled musicians.
This is not to say that the music fails. The fragmented style is
intentional and carefully orchestrated into arrestingly brilliant
music.
The carnival atmosphere of Waits’ music is present in the
play’s opening scene, in which an announcer, dressed in neon
green with his face slathered in clown-like makeup, stands on
stilts singing the play’s theme song, “Misery’s
the river of the world, everybody row!”
Waits’ odd-ball sense of humor shows up as well. Bawdy
limericks with punch lines like, “the plural of spouse is
spice,” and characters like the Drum Major, a stereotypically
devilish American southerner, who says, “I wish the whole
world was schnapps,” exemplify this.
Along with Waits’ humor and eccentricity is a jagged
tenderness expressed through violin-backed love ballads, which
emerge in the midst of the play’s crumbling sanity.
Waits’ appreciation for the trials of hard-luck
anti-heroes and his mad vision fit easily into the world Wilson has
created from Büchner’s text. The synergy of the two
artists is shown in a scene in which Woyzeck, dressed like a
Picasso harlequin sent to the madhouse, runs desperately in place
against the neurotic chorus, “God’s away on
business.” Wilson’s staging and Waits’ music
grippingly convey the protagonist’s mental angst and the
hopelessness of his universe.
The play’s lighting is effective in capturing the
character’s emotions. The spectrum of colors that shifts
behind the actors, and occasionally upon the actors themselves,
ranges from lustful red to eerie, toxic green.
Wilson is able to paint with the lights, and in doing so fuses
music, literature, and painting into the single realm of
theater.
Perhaps the best example of this occurs when Woyzeck and his
unfaithful wife Marie sing a love ballad together. It ends in a
tender embrace, while the lights paint a golden sunset, and
Marie’s prerecorded voice angrily repeats her disdain of
Woyzeck’s touch. Here the arts collide, Marie’s
thoughts reveal the scene’s artificiality, and the audience
is torn with emotion.