“Woyzeck”, a German play about a soldier who is tortured by both army and medical authorities. It is not until his wife cheats on him that he can’t take any more and out of outrage, kills her. It is a play that the playwright wrote to be performed as an expressionistic piece.
The CSUN production of this play followed very closely the way Georg Buchner meant for this play to be performed and with the exception of a few places where it was a little too extreme, I think the production was done very well.
The director used quite a few expressionistic skills to add to the play. This includes white easels which were rolled in and out of the stage and used for a number of different effects. One of those effects was shadows which were cast both from the front and through the back, which allowed the audience to see an alternative view of the play. Also the director chose to display images and handwriting on the easels to set the audience and the actors into the setting. Finally one of the last expressionist skills that the director chose to incorporate into the play was the movement of the easels in a clockwise turning to symbolize two different things at two different times. The first was to symbolize time with gears displayed on the easels and floor and the second was to symbolize a cleansing with water drops to show that Woyzeck and Marie were in the water.
For the most part, the play was very believable and the audience felt connected but there were a few times when I had to question what was happening, for example when the characters would start collapsing. Even now, I am still not entirely sure what the significance of the falling was.
In terms of the world of the play, Woyzeck does attempt to create a pre World War 1 or 2 historical context. The actor who played the captain at least in this production seemed to resemble a dictator like “Adolph Hitler” especially down to his lines about, if I’m not wrong, getting rid of Jews. Also the social class of Franz Woyzeck and his wife played very much into the respect that they got.
One other thing, I would like to add with regards Marie and I don’t know if this was a director’s decision or if the playwright meant this but Marie at least in the production, took after the biblical character of Mary Magdalene in that she even goes as far as to quote directly from the bible. I thought this was especially interesting and would say almost certainly that this was a decision of the director because of the Westernized society that it was performed in.
Looking at Franz Woyzeck and his role in his community, he measured up with another character in the production and that was the black worker/slave, who by the way also depicted a similar character as the one from the movie “Show Boat”, especially when he broke out in song several times. This is probably another decision of the director, maybe even because the film “Show Boat”. It was this depiction of Woyzeck as a slave/worker that was tortured which made the audience empathize with him throughout the play, even when he murdered his own wife. The treatment of him that drew to his madness made us want everything to get better for him.
Overall, the production was very pleasant to watch. It was a serious play with several comedic sections, music that set the mood of each scene and the rhythmic movement of the actors on stage to confuse and make us think about what’s going on.