Any production of Woyzeck is an adaptation. The source material is as messy as Central Europe in 1836 when the 23-year-old Georg Büchner wrote four drafts, if you can even call them that, of his experimental play before dying suddenly of typhus. No one knows how he would have finished it. It was the third play he’d written since he’d turned 21. None were staged. Woyzeck waited nearly a century for composer Alban Berg to bring it to attention as an opera.
Büchner risked imprisonment (there was, in fact, a warrant for his arrest) to argue in a published tract for a democratic revolution in his home state of Hesse-Darmstadt, one of a sea of authoritarian principalities in what is now Germany. His stand for human rights in Woyzeck , combined with its despairing tone, has inspired many 20th- and 21st-century artists to fashion personal interpretations. The American director Robert Wilson engaged singer-songwriter Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan to compose songs for a German production in 2000.
In 2006, Milwaukee’s James Butchart devised a version for Milwaukee Dance Theatre that made the Waits-Brennan songs central, drastically cutting Büchner’s dialogue to make room for the song lyrics in a dance piece for performers who also spoke. Milwaukee Dance Theatre is now Theatre Gigante. Because our time is messy too, the company is reviving the production through Saturday, March 12.
Gently lighted by Rick Graham, Frank Pahl and Christine Zufferey do an excellent job with the songs and, in a formal fashion, with some of the many small roles in Büchner’s script. Woyzeck is the story of a German peasant, servant to an army captain and the subject of a cruel medical experiment who, increasingly disoriented, murders his mistress Marie, the mother of his child, after she has an affair with a local hero.
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The medical scientist is played with a Ruth Westheimer accent by the estimable Leslie Fitzwater. Michael Stebbins is perfect as the blindly narcissistic Captain. The handsome Edwin Olvera is well cast as the well-to-do Drum Major who seduces Marie, but we see him mostly as a shadow on a screen. I greatly admire Isabelle Kralj and Mark Anderson, but Marie and Woyzeck should be played by young actors. The songs, too, infectious as they are, pulled me out of the story. The production’s minimalist style is already sufficiently distancing.
Through March 12, at Kenilworth Theatre 508, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For tickets, call 414-961-6119 or visit theatregigante.org.
