[I’ve written before about many of Leonardo Shapiro’s productions, most recently his staging of Blue Heaven/Going to Iraq by Karen Malpede from 1992. The coronavirus pandemic has shut down the theaters, so I no longer have new plays on which to report for Rick On Theater, so I have to look elsewhere for topics on which to blog. I turn to my archive of material on old productions—this one is 44 years old—to fill the gap.
[Besides, I think these old shows, especially
Shapiro’s, are interesting. They’re
different, and I found Shapiro and his work fascinating. Maybe you all agree.
[Below is Part 1 of my reconstruction of Shapiro’s
production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck; Part 2 will be
posted on Tuesday, 14 July. The first
section mostly covers the background of the production with some information on
two of the principle artistsfs in the endeavor: the playwright and the leading
actor in the show, Joseph Chaikin. I’ll
pick up with a description of the production itself in the second installment.]
The Shaliko Company of New York City opened its production
of Georg Büchner’s 1836 play, Woyzeck, at the Public Theater on 24 March
1976. Starring Joseph Chaikin
(1935-2003) in the title role, it was the fourth Shaliko play and the last to
be affiliated with Joseph Papp (1921-91) and the New York Shakespeare Festival (now
called The Public Theater, formerly the name of NYSF’s home base). The presentation was also the end of the
period, from 1972 to 1977, which company and production director Leonardo
Shapiro (1946-97) designated as “Meetings with Classical Texts.”
Before producing Büchner’s best-known play, Shaliko, founded
in 1972, had presented Children of the
Gods, a collage of Greek classical plays; The Measures Taken, a 1930 Brecht Lehrstück; and Ghosts, an
1881 Ibsen classic.
Shapiro regarded these texts as “found objects” to be
treated as librettos which, as one of the director’s two major inspirations,
Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), intended, furnished “only a theme” that Shapiro used
to create “a new, independent work, a theater production.”
Shapiro said he chose Woyzeck because he was looking
for a play to do with Chaikin, with whom Shapiro had participated in workshops
at Grotowski’s Research University of the 1975 Theatre of Nations in Wrocław,
Poland. The two theater artists agreed
that Büchner’s anti-heroic soldier would be a good vehicle for the actor.
Shapiro said he’d known Chaikin somewhat before they
collaborated on Woyzeck. Before the trip to Poland, Shapiro saw
Chaikin in the Living Theatre’s 1962 production of Brecht’s Man Is Man (see “Dueling Brechts,” posted
on Rick
On Theater on 24 and 27 January 2014). The
resemblance between the characters of Franz Woyzeck and Galy Gay in Brecht’s Man
Is Man was a force in the selection of the production material.
In addition, Shapiro had seen The Serpent by Chaikin’s own Open Theater in 1969 and found it “one
of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.”
Then Chaikin came to the Public to see Shaliko’s staging of Brecht’s The
Measures Taken in 1974 “and really loved it and wanted to do something
with” Shaliko.
Woyzeck would be the
first acting Chaikin had done since he appeared as Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in 1969-70. The Open Theater production was directed by
Roberta Sklar at the troupe’s West 14th Street loft. But Chaikin was growing disinterested in
directing now and wanted to go back to acting.
Chaikin in 1976 was already an icon of the experimental
theater both in the United States and abroad.
He’d been a member of Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre,
the grand-daddy of U.S. avant-garde theaters, since 1959. He left the Living in 1963, just before Beck
(1925-85) and Malina (1926-2015) took the troupe into long-term exile in
Europe, to found his own experimental company, the Open Theater. “He was a hero of mine,” declared Shapiro.
Shapiro had been hitchhiking from his Massachusetts prep
school to Manhattan and exploring Greenwich Village theater and the nascent
Off-Off-Broadway movement as a young teenager.
His cousin Bob Dylan (b. 1941) was performing folk music in such spaces
as the Caffe Cino which also was presenting plays.
(I’ve blogged about both the early Off-Off-Broadway scene in
the Village and the Caffe Cino. See my
posts “Greenwich Village Theater in the 1960s,” 12 and 15 December 2011, and “Caffe Cino,” 11 and 14 September 2018.)
Shapiro also began hanging around the Living Theatre’s West
14th Street building where he almost certainly came into contact with Chaikin
(and another hanger-on, Al Pacino, b. 1940—whose début public performance I
believe Shapiro saw at the Cino).
Chaikin’s book The
Presence of The Actor was first published in 1972 and quickly became a
standard text for nearly all American actors and acting students. (Shapiro assigned it as one of the required
reading texts for his Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program.)
In 1975, he started over again, establishing the Other
Theatre. At the time of his performance
in Woyzeck, Chaikin had won two Obie
Awards, the recognition given by the Village
Voice for excellence Off-Broadway: a
1963 Obie for Distinguished Performance for the Living’s Man Is Man and a 1965 Obie for Distinguished Performance for the
Writer’s Stage Company’s Victim of Duty
(Ionesco, 1964) and the Greenwich Players’ The
Exception and the Rule (Brecht, 1965).
Chaikin would win four more Obies over
his career, including 1977’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the first the Obies
ever gave, and a 1981 Special Citation.
There were a passel of other awards and honors during his lifetime. Then in 1984, Chaikin
suffered a stroke during open-heart surgery, leaving him
partially aphasic.
Having turned from performing to directing and
writing—he collaborated with Sam Shepard (1943-2017) on several projects—in the
1980s, he worked until the last. Chaikin
died at 67 in 2003 of heart failure; he was inducted posthumously into the
Theater Hall of Fame in 2010. (I have a
post on the Hall of Fame on ROT on 10
February.)
The veteran avant-gardist said that Woyzeck was a play to which he’d always
been drawn. He wanted to work on it for
some time, either as an actor or a director.
In fact, according to the Village
Voice’s Arthur Sainer, Chaikin had started working on the role ten years
before Shapiro approached him. The
prospective production, however, was abandoned before Chaikin got far with the
work.
Many theater people, including academics and
reviewers, refer to Woyzeck as a “fragment,” implying that Büchner had
left the play unfinished at his death.
Most scholars, however, agree that Büchner had written all the scenes of
Woyzeck, but had simply left no instructions about the order in which to
play them. Herbert Lindenberger (1929-2018), a professor of English and comparative
literature at Stanford University, for
example, unequivocally states: “There is no reason to believe that Büchner
intended to add any scenes to those left in the manuscript . . . .”
Shapiro described Büchner’s text as “a bunch
of scenes found in a drawer” and explained, “The project is an . . . investigation
[and] reworking” of the play, with “the text as a starting point in the
creation of a piece which will be distinctly contemporary and American.”
The director saw the play as the author’s
“prophetic vision of the devaluation of Man in the modern world, a world which
was just dawning at the time of Büchner’s death.” Shapiro continued: “The world of the play is
a world of victimization, in which the nature of man is called into question.”
Woyzeck, in fact, illustrated a recurring Shaliko theme:
the plight of the common man, “the people who aren’t represented.” In the director’s description, Woyzeck’s “the
man on the bottom, the man who had nothing but two bits . . . .” What Shapiro called “the lumpen proletariat”
was a frequent subject of Shaliko works such as Strangers (described in my post of 3 and 6 March
2014).
It was perhaps one of Shapiro’s most pervasive
interests, equal in intensity to his concern for the artist in society,
considered in such works as The Yellow House, Kafka: Father and Son,
Blue Heaven, and The Seagull (all mentioned in several ROT posts), and second in
frequency only to the sacrifice of children, common to almost all Shaliko
works.
(The plays referenced above are in these
posts: “The
Yellow House,” 9 February 2018; “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5
and 8 November 2015; and “Blue Heaven (or Going to Iraq),” 11 and
14 May 2020. Shapiro’s mounting of The
Seagull is mentioned in the first parts of both “Kafka” and “Blue
Heaven.”)
No one is commoner than Franz Woyzeck: he is
without power, without control even of the rudiments of his own life. In Shapiro’s view, Franz Woyzeck, like all
little men, is metaphorically one of society’s children—like soldiers and
artists—whom we are collectively meant to protect and nurture, not feed to the
industrial-capitalist machine.
(Surprise! Shapiro was an
anarchist. Pyotr Kropotkin, about whom I
blogged on 13 and 16 June, was one of his inspirations.)
From
Shapiro’s perspective, Georg Büchner (1813-37) was a “twenty-three year
old [sic] genius in 1837,” when he died and his play was discovered, “a
doctor and a revolutionary, a contemporary of [Karl] Marx [1818-83] and
[Charles] Darwin [1809-82].”
Büchner
was born on 17 October 1813 in Goddelau
in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the son of Karl Ernst Büchner (1786-1861),
a physician in service to Louis I, Grand Duke of Hesse (1753-1830; reigned 1806-30). He participated in the revolutionary turmoil
of the 1830s, wrote three plays that would upset dramatic literature and a novella
which is a masterpiece, studied philosophy, defended a thesis in biology, and
taught anatomy at the university.
Büchner
spent his childhood in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt with his parents. In 1831, he enrolled at the Faculty of
Medicine at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace, then part of France. While at university, the young medical student
discovered political action and associated with secret republican organizations,
such as the Society of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Société des
droits de l’homme et du citoyen) which espoused the most radical ideas of the
French Revolution.
Returning
to Germany in October 1833, Büchner founded two human rights societies on
the model of the French association. Following
a denunciation, most of the organizers were arrested, but Büchner narrowly
escaped and took refuge with his parents.
In constant fear of being summoned before a judge, the nascent dramatist
wrote Danton’s Death in January 1835.
Having barely
finished the play, Büchner had to flee Hesse-Darmstadt and took refuge in
Strasbourg where led the life of a political exile. In the Alsatian capital, he continued his
studies, abandoning medicine to shift to biology.
At the
same time, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy, reading the Greek
philosophers, René Descartes (1596-1650), and Baruch Spinoza (1632-77). To make a living, he translated Lucrèce
Borgia and Marie Tudor, two 1833 plays by Victor Hugo
(1802-85), into German.
Having
read unpublished notes by Pastor J. F. (Jean-Frédéric) Oberlin (1740-1826) about
the German Sturm und Drang poet Jacob Michael Lenz (1751-92)
staying in the Alsatian village of Waldersbach, Büchner wrote Lenz, a
novella he left incomplete at his death, between April and November 1835. In the book, Büchner described the acute
mental disorders and the sufferings of the young poet in a style which is seen
as a precursor to literary modernism.
In May
1836, the 23-year-old student finished his biology thesis, “Mémoire sur le
système nerveux du barbeaux (Cyprinus barbus L.)” (“Memoire on the
nervous system of the barbel fish”). Then
he wrote the first version of Leonce and Lena. On 3 September, Büchner was awarded a
doctorate in medicine from the University of Zurich.
In the
months that followed, the dramatist worked on Woyzeck, on a second
version of Leonce and Lena, and perhaps on a drama that has now
disappeared, Pietro Aretino (about the Italian author, playwright,
poet, satirist, and blackmailer [1492-1556], who wielded influence on
contemporary art and politics).
On 18 October,
he moved to Zurich and, in mid-November, began his courses in comparative
anatomy at the university. At the end of
January 1837, he fell ill with typhus and died on 19 February, leaving Woyzeck unfinished.
In
1850, the playwright’s brother, Ludwig Büchner (1824-99), a renowned philosopher,
physiologist, and physician, published Georg’s Posthumous Works without Woyzeck,
which would be published in 1875 under the erroneous title “Wozzeck” (the
name of Alban Berg’s 1922 opera adaptation of the play—a common mistake).
Georg
Büchner saw only his thesis and Danton’s Death published in his
lifetime. He never heard a word he wrote
spoken from a stage, however. Yet, his
plays and other writings had a profound impact on modern—and post-modern—drama
and literature.
Büchner’s play Woyzeck was probably written between June and September 1836. The playwright based it loosely on the true
story of Johann Christian Woyzeck (1780-1824), a Leipzig apprentice wigmaker. He became a drifter in the late 1790s and
ended up enlisting in the army of one of Germany’s many principalities. (Germany wasn’t united as a sovereign nation
until 1871.)
Johann Woyzeck met a woman named Wienberger in
1807 and they had a child out of wedlock.
In 1818, Johann returned to Leipzig and started a relationship with Johanna
Christiane Woost, a widow who was having liaisons with other solders. Johann started drinking and became insanely
jealous; he began abusing Johanna until he bought a broken sword blade for
which he made a handle.
One evening in 1821, Johann went to meet
Johanna, but she was out with one of her other soldiers. He found her later and stabbed her,
surrendering to the police almost immediately afterward. The trial and subsequent wrangling over
Johann’s sentencing took over three years.
Despite evidence that Johann Woyzeck suffered
from persistent emotional and psychological problems and was almost certainly
not responsible for his actions, Johann was found guilty and sentenced to be
executed. Before a crowd of several
thousand spectators in Leipzig’s market square, Johann Woyzeck was beheaded on Friday,
27 August 1824.
(The published reports of Johann Christian
August Clarus, 1774-1854, a medical doctor engaged to assess Johann Woyzeck’s
mental condition, were Büchner’s principal source for the story on which he
based his play.)
The play, mostly finished but left as
unorganized scenes, was found in the writer’s desk after his death in
1837. (There are fragments of at last
one unfinished scene among the pages.)
The first collection of Büchner’s writing, Nachgelassene Schriften (“Posthumous works”) was published without Woyzeck.
The play first appeared in print in periodicals in 1875 and 1877, then
it was included in the edition of Büchner’s collected works released in 1879.
All three publications used the erroneous
title “Wozzeck,” under which title the play was first produced and republished
in editions based on the first issues.
The reason for the error was quite simple: the first editor, who didn’t
know about the factual account on which Büchner had based his script, first,
couldn’t read the writer’s tiny handwriting and, second, found the ink badly
faded.
(The misreading was probably exacerbated by
the fact that Büchner would have written in Frakturschrift—German
Gothic—the alphabet used in Germany until 1941.
In that handwriting, the y and
the z are nearly identical and, if
the playwright’s script was truly minuscule, possibly undistinguishable.)
The play was first staged by Max Rheinhardt (1873-1943)
at the Residenztheater in Munich on 8 November 1913. A new edition of the text was published in
1921, on which occasion the correct title finally appeared. The first translation into English was made in
1927, published along with Büchner’s other two plays.
The first
staging in New York City, and what seems to have been the United States
première, was announced for an Off-Broadway opening of 25 November 1963 at an unnamed theater. (I haven’t been able to confirm that the
production actually happened.) The
adaptation of the script was from Richard Reich and the production was to have
been directed by Gene Frankel (1919-2005).
If that 1963
production wasn’t mounted, the next New York-area stagings on record were two
revivals presented within a month of one another in 1971. In April, New Haven, Connecticut’s Yale
Repertory Theatre produced Büchner’s play in rep with Samuel Beckett’s Play, directed by Rom Haas. In May, the Actors’ Group staged the play at
the Fortune Theater in the East Village directed by Robert Weinstein.
The East
Village troupe the Classic Stage Company presented a production in 1975. The adaptation was made by CSC founder and artistic director
Christopher Martin, who also directed. (Martin
staged another presentation of Woyzeck
at CSC in 1981 on a bill with Büchner’s Leonce
and Lena.) The first CSC production
was followed by the Shapiro-Chaikin collaboration of 1976.
For a play
often described as seldom-produced, the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw
quite a number of versions of Woyzeck,
including adaptations, In 1990, the
Hartford Stage Company of Connecticut put on a production staged by the
renowned avant-garde director Richard Foreman (b. 1937). Then the Off-Off-Broadway company the Jean
Cocteau Repertory, also in the East Village, mounted another rep with Leonce and Lena in 1991.
In 1992, the
newly renamed Joseph Papp Public Theater (after Papp’s death), produced an
adaptation by Henry J. Schmidt, with Music by Philip Glass (b. 1937) and
directed by new artistic director JoAnne Akalaitis (b. 1937). Soon after, as part of the Public’s annual
International Festival of Puppet Theater two years later, the company presented
an adaptation by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company (War Horse, 2007; Lincoln Center, 2011) called Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992) in which Franz is a black migrant
worker during the twilight of apartheid. The production was adapted and directed by William
Kentridge (b. 1955).
At the end of
the century, Jeff Cohen created an adaptation he called Whoa-Jack with New York’s Worth Street Theatre Company. In the 1999 play, at the Tribeca Playhouse in
downtown Manhattan, Private Jackson is an African-American soldier in Alabama
in 1960.
Internationally
known experimental theater director Robert Wilson (b. 1941) created a
production of Büchner’s play with the Betty Nansen Theater of Copenhagen with
music by Tom Waits (b. 1949) and Kathleen Brennan (b. 1955) . The 2000 production was spoken in Danish
while the songs were sung in English.
(The production played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave
Festival in Fort Greene in 2002.)
In 2004, the LAByrinth
Theater Company presented an adaptation entitled Guinea Pig Solo by Brett C. Leonard. In the production, directed by Ian Belton,
José Solo is an Iraq War veteran trapped in post-9/11 New York. Guinea
Pig Solo follows Büchner’s outline fairly closely.
In 2006,
London’s Gate Theatre brought a Rock ’n’ Roll adaptation of the play to St.
Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass); the
production, originally staged in 2004, was directed by Daniel Kramer (b. 1977).
PTSD was examined
in Reservoir, a 2011 version of the
play from Eric Henry Sanders. Presented
by the Drilling Company on New York City’s Upper West Side under the direction
of Hamilton Clancy, Army private Frank Hasek, back from the Middle East, is
overwhelmed by the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
In 2015, Jeremy
Duncan Pape composed an adaptation for No-Win Productions with D. L. Siegel
they called Woyzeck, FJF (the initials
in the military-style designation, as if for a serviceman’s “201 File,” stand
for the character’s full given name, Friedrich Johann Franz). Directed at the New Ohio Theatre in the West
Village by Pape, the production is set in a padded cell of an asylum.
In addition to
the adaptations of Woyzeck into other
dramas, even other forms of drama (like the puppet play, for instance),
Büchner’s play has been remade in other forms as well. There was even a 1991 novel by German-born
Canadian professor emeritus of English literature Ekbert Faas (b. 1938). Woyzeck’s
Head has been described as the “most philosophically ambitious and dense of
all the novels . . . .”
The most
prominent is Austrian composer Alban Berg’s avant-garde, atonal opera Wozzeck.
(Berg, 1885-1935, had seen the Vienna début of the play, when it still
bore the erroneous title.) Wozzeck, which is often observed to be
more frequently produced than its source, was started in 1913, but Berg was
interrupted in his composing by World War I (he was conscripted into the
Austrian army) and he completed it in 1921.
The opera had
its world première at the Berlin State Opera in 1925; it didn’t début in the
U.S. until 1931, however, when the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company performed
it at the Philadelphia Metropolitan Opera House with Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977)
conducting. The opera’s New York City première was in 1952 by the New York City Opera Company at City Center; it entered the
Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire in 1959.
There’s been at
least one other opera version of the play, also called Wozzeck, by Manfred Gurlitt (1890-1972), which premièred in Bremen Germany,
in April 1926. There’ve also been
several musical-theater versions, including the 2000 Robert Wilson adaptation.
Woyzeck Musical Deathmetal, a
musical-theater adaptation by Christopher Carter Sanderson was produced at the
Kentucky Repertory Theatre in Horse Cave in a workshop in November 2011; it was
later performed at the Times Square International Theater Festival, in January
2012. Woyzeck Masalı (“The tale of Woyzeck”), a 2015 rock-musical
adaptation produced by Tatbikat Sahnesi (theater) in Ankara, Turkey, was adapted
and directed by Erdal Beşikçioğlu (b. 1970).
Another version
of Büchner’s tragedy set to music is German choreographer and director
Christian Spuck’s ballet Woyzeck
which premièred at the Norwegian National Ballet in Oslo in 2011. (Spuck, b. 1969, also created an opera
version of the playwright’s Léonce et
Léna in 2008.)
There’ve been
at least seven film adaptations of Woyzeck
(plus another six of Berg’s opera and 14 TV movies in various countries) in a
variety of languages. The first was a
1947 German film (with the title Wozzeck)
by Georg C. Klaren (1900-62) which includes a character named Georg Büchner, a
medical student, who serves as a narrator and explicator. This movie made its U.S. première in New York
City in 1962.
Films made in
languages other than German or English include a 1966 Persian (Farsi)
adaptation by Dariush Mehrjui (b. 1939), one from Guy Marignane of France in
1993, and a Hungarian film by János Szász (b. 1958) from 1994.
Italy produced a Woyzeck by Giancarlo Cobelli (1929–2012) in 1973 and so did
Portugal, by Tiago Durão in 2014. Woyzeck 2010, made in Iceland by Gísli
Örn Garðarsson (b. 1973) in the year of the title, and 2004’s Woyzeck by Álvaro Olavarría (b. 1970), are
in English.
After Klaren’s Wozzeck, German film director and
screenwriter Werner Herzog (b. 1942) made a Woyzeck
in 1979 (with Klaus Kinski, 1926-91, in the title role), followed by Wodzeck, a 1985 film by Oliver Herbrich (b.
1961) set in the present day. The first
feature-length movie adaptation of Woyzeck
made in Britain was a 2010 film by Francis Annan (b. 1984), which was filmed
at, and used students from, Xaverian College in Manchester, England.
The Shaliko production of Woyzeck began previews on Friday, 5 March 1976, opened on Friday,
24 March, and ran until Sunday, 25 April.
Performances were in Martinson Hall, the largest space at the Public,
located on the third floor. Shapiro
called it “a beautiful space” into which he and his team installed a 200-seat
theater.
Staged by Shaliko artistic director Shapiro, Büchner’s
German text was translated and adapted by Mira Rafalowicz (1941-98), who also
served as dramaturg. The costumes were
designed by Patricia McGourty and the lights by Nicholas Wolff Lyndon; the original
music, played by an ensemble of drums, flutes, and an organ, was composed by Peter
Golub. Ronald Antone coordinated the set
design, which was conceived by director Shapiro.
A co-production with NYSF and Chaikin’s Other
Theatre, Woyzeck had a cast of nine
actors to cover 29 parts; only three actors played single roles: Chaikin as
Woyzeck, Jane Mandel as Marie, and Jim Carrington as the Idiot.
Shapiro and Rafalowicz used 15 of Büchner’s 26
scenes, so the show ran just 58 minutes.
No scene played longer than three minutes, so the scene-changes were
“kaleidoscopic” in their rapidity. Shapiro
had scheduled 16 weeks of rehearsals for about an eight-week performance run
(including the previews). “It pretty
much sold out in New York; a lot of that was due to Joe (Chaikin . . .).”
Shapiro said Woyzeck was the company’s
“most normal show,” with dates and other matters planned in advance because the
cast included people who weren’t members of the Shaliko ensemble, including
some former actors from Chaikin’s Open Theater (Ron Faber and Ray Barry who
played, respectively, the Captain and the Drum Major among other roles);
dramaturg Rafalowicz had also worked with the Open Theater. Chaikin, appearing for the first time since
his days with the Living Theatre as an actor in a performance of a company
that’s not his own, quipped: “This is as commercial as I’ve gotten in ten
years.”
The director worked on the show “[t]he way I
work best,” he said:
It was broken
into a couple of different periods . . . .
I work . . . by building something, and then go away from it and then
come back, and the more times I can do that, the better.
Franz Woyzeck (Chaikin), a soldier from the
lowest class of society, is simply everyone’s victim. He serves as an orderly to the Captain (Ron
Faber), who treats him as a pawn, and a guinea pig to the Doctor (Jake Dengel),
who dehumanizes him. (Today, the
Doctor’s experimentation on Woyzeck inevitably reminds viewers of Nazi
atrocities that would come along a century after Büchner wrote his play.)
Woyzeck lives with Marie (Mandel), the mother
of his child (named Christian, like the real-life Woyzeck’s middle name), but
they aren’t married. Woyzeck loves
Marie, but she cheats on him with the vain, macho, but handsome Drum Major (Raymond
J. Barry, who’s over six feet tall with an impressive physique and a mane of black
hair, towering over the short Chaikin’s Woyzeck). The Drum Major, beats Woyzeck up and
humiliates him.
In a fit of jealousy and despair, Woyzeck buys
a knife from a pawnbroker (Faber) and stabs Marie to death on the bank of a
pond. He attempts to dispose of the
knife in the pond as his little son is seen playing nearby (Carrington as the
Idiot, with a doll).
As a hangman on a gallows prepares a noose for
Woyzeck, a policeman (Barry) says, “A good murder, a real murder, a beautiful murder . . . .”
(In most versions of the play, Woyzeck falls
into the pond and drowns, but this is considered by many scholars to be an
interpolation added by the play’s first German editor. Shapiro and Rafalowicz seem to have taken the
idea of a public execution from the story of Johann Woyzeck—except that his
beheading was perhaps deemed too gruesome.)
In an interesting sidelight regarding casting,
which I think throws some light onto Shapiro’s thinking about Woyzeck and perhaps his reasons for
doing this play, he said that he wanted to play the pawnbroker, the man who
sells Woyzeck the knife, himself.
(Shapiro isn’t the kind of director who casts himself in his
productions. He acted in high school and
college, but not in his professional career.)
He had a reason for this desire. He had intended to portray the Jewish
pawnbroker as a portrait of his father, “the Republic Finance Corporation, Hamm
Building, St. Paul, MN—but everyone knew it was ‘the Jew.’”
Shapiro was estranged from
his father, who died in 1974, from early childhood, when Irving Shapiro left his
wife with insufficient income to care for their sons while he lived well
himself, with another, younger woman.
(In 1992, in his revival of Mark Rozovsky’s Kafka: Father and Son, he had the actor George Bartenieff play
Hermann Kafka, the remote and abusive father, as Irving Shapiro.)
The acting in general (as I discussed in my
blog post “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013) was
Brechtian-influenced rather than Stanislavskian (or its derivative, Method). “I must depict Woyzeck, tell about him, not be him,” explained Chaikin, succinctly
expressing Shapiro’s approach to acting as well.
Actors shouldn’t emotionally and
psychologically merge with their characters, but remain autonomous so that they
can comment on the characters and their experiences. (This is the core of Brechtian “alienation,”
which means ‘distancing,’ not ‘estrangement’ or ‘antagonism.’) This was the
style of all the performances in Shapiro’s Woyzeck.
One review-writer in particular was displeased
with this practice. Cynthia Lee Jenner
wrote in The Villager, “Not only does Chaikin detach himself from his
character, he also detaches the audience from the life of the play.” She urged him to “give up trying to tell
us about Woyzeck . . . . Concern
yourself with what your character is feeling and we’ll take care of ourselves.”
The actors of both Shaliko and the Open
Theater were adept at physicality on the stage and body work and gestural
performance were central to the production style. Carrington’s Idiot was nearly a wordless
character, for instance, communicating almost exclusively by pantomime.
Shapiro’s casting was also in this vein—in the
sense that it wasn’t realistic or logical.
Ray Barry, for example, played the grandmother near the end of the play
(a choice that pleased some reviewers and exasperated others).
[I hope you’re intrigued by this glimpse at a long-ago
experimental theater production. Please
come back in three days to read Part 2 of my reconstruction of the Shaliko-NYSF-Other
Theatre production of Woyzeck.]
No comments:
Post a Comment