'Woyzeck' (The Shaliko Company, 1976) – Part 2

[Welcome back to my reconstruction of Leonardo Shapiro’s staging of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, his 1836 unfinished play.  In Part 2, below, I discuss the physical production at New York City’s Public Theater in the spring of 1976 and then present a sampling of the critical reception. 

[If you haven’t read Part 1 of “Woyzeck,” I strongly recommend going back to 11 July and do so before reading this conclusion.  Aside from covering the background of the Shaliko-New York Shakespeare Festival-Other Theatre production of the classic play, I identify and define many of the names, concepts, and terms that recur below.]

Woyzeck’s physical production was relatively simple, even for the Shaliko Company.  It was  entirely made of construction scaffolding—a technique director Leonardo Shapiro would use again in The Yellow House in 1986.

Jerry Rojo (b. 1935), who had worked with Chaikin and the Open Theater previously, was going to do the set for Woyzeck.  The environmental theater designer had also conceived several Shaliko  sets, including 1975’s Ghosts as well as the aforementioned Yellow House. 

The set he conceived for Woyzeck, however, was going to cost $10,000.  Shapiro told the designer, “I’m sorry, we just can’t afford it,” and the director proceeded to design the Woyzeck set out of scaffolding that was $500 including pick-up and delivery.  (The costs are approximately the equivalent of $45,000 and $2,250 today.)

Shapiro recounted:

It was all made out of standard scaffolding, including the boards.  They delivered it.  We put it together in one day.  When the show was over, we called them and they took it back. 

The scheme not only saved the company both money and time, but there wasn’t any waste, pointed out the director.  He was rather proud of that because if they’d have built a set themselves, “When you’re done with it, then you just throw it away.”  His way, the scaffolding company retrieved it.

Rojo didn’t end up designing the final set, but his concept for it,  which Shapiro still labeled “lovely” (irrespective of the cost), held true for the cost-saving alternative.  Rojo characterized Martinson Hall, the production’s venue at the Public Theater, as “an elegant 19th-century room with a high ceiling, clear story [sic; ‘clerestory’] light and fluted columns.”

Rojo asked rhetorically, “So how do we deal with that room for Woyzeck which is brutal, bare and has to do with a class system?  Well, in our idea we agreed that we would play against the room.”

Shapiro said he “wanted something simple, rough, and symmetrical” to fit inside the Martinson’s “beautiful cast iron pillars.”  The scaffolding fit the bill.  As Shapiro explained his vision:

I was interested in medieval wagon shows and Las Vegas runways and Kabuki Hanamichi and vaudeville stage pictures.  I wanted Woyzeck to keep bursting out into the audience unsupported, like a Chaplin drunk.

(Charlie Chaplin, 1889-1977, was one of the few actors Shapiro admired.  The hanamichi is a long, thin, raised platform that runs from the back of a Japanese Kabuki theater, through the audience, to connect with the main stage.)

Shapiro and Rojo, continued the designer, decided to work against the room’s elegance, “so we thought we’d come into it with a kind of violence by using steel pipes and raw timber—rough-hewn timbers growing right out of these white, thin columns.”

The scaffolding was a close approximation of what Rojo had devised—only cheaper  and less labor-intensive.  As one reviewer described the result, it was “all so casual, scaffolding and planks set under the vaultlike interior of the Public Theatre’s Martinson Hall . . . .”  Another writer affirmed that “the setting [coordinated] with the space on which it is set in a uniquely creative manner.”

Two wooden runways (a pair of hanamichi?) formed a cross at one end of the Martinson with the scaffolding around them beneath the “vaulted ceiling and Romanesque arches,” creating what another reviewer dubbed “a dismal Kafkaesque setting.”  The audience viewed the performance from three sides.

Patricia McGourty’s costumes were in the same vein: plain, simple, ragged, and soiled.  Woyzeck, for instance, wore baggy uniform pants that were made from quilted moving blankets or furniture pads, held up by wide suspenders.  Shapiro explained that he “was thinking of early [Bertold]] Brecht and [Samuel] Beckett tramps, Bert Lahr and Red Skelton.” 

In line with both Shapiro’s tendency and Chaikin’s practice, the two artists, who both put considerable emphasis on physical performance, conceived a specific, stylized walk for Woyzeck.  As the director described it, it “was a broken, stuttering deconstruction . . . of Mick Jagger’s runway strut.” 

(Chaikin remarked later that he found himself falling into his character off stage: “I was walking down the street, and about four steps I took was in the walk of Woyzeck without my wanting to at all.  Pieces of the character stick to me.”

The response in the press, which was large, was decidedly mixed and leaned toward the negative.  Douglas Watt of the New York Daily News opened his notice with, “It is with a heavy heart, not to mention limbs, that I bring you news of George Buechner’s ‘Woyzeck’ . . . .”  Watt continued: “Taking Buechner’s . . . creation, . . . the Shaliko people have subjected it to so bald, lifeless, and deliberately untheatrical a treatment that the result is a non-play.”

Watt isn’t kinder to Chaikin, describing him as “short” and “dough-faced” and deemed that he played Woyzeck “so vacantly as to have almost no presence at all.”

In the New York Post, Sylviane Gold found Shaliko’s approach to the play “almost gothic—Woyzeck as a bewildered, bisexual madman,” which Gold thought might “serve if Buechner shared the romantic outlook of his contemporaries [Alfred] de Musset [1810-57] and [Victor] Hugo [1802-85].”  Of Chaikin’s performance, Gold declared that “his Woyzeck takes over the stage from the rest of the company . . . .  But it’s a Woyzeck that’s bereft of humanity, an automaton, a lobotomized stutterer whose words are shouted in a monochromatic voice.” 

Her response to the walk Shapiro and Chaikin devised is that Woyzeck “moves in a dream, heavy-limbed and distracted and understanding nothing.  But Buechner’s Woyzeck understands too much and that’s his problem.” 

The New York Times’ Clive Barnes launched into his review saying that “one would like to welcome Leonardo Shapiro’s production” of Woyzeck, “but in all honesty one cannot.”  He specified his reasons: “Mr. Shapiro’s staging appeared crude, emblematic and undramatic.  The grim setting was not ineffective, but most of the acting had a dull brashness to it.” 

“There was one real exception to the general rule of mediocrity, however, and this was Joseph Chaikin’s performance,” continued Barnes. 

[H]is portrayal here was masterly in its crumbling, shambling dignity.  With bright raising eyes stuck in a gray potato face, with his voice reduced to an oppressed monotone and his gestures imprisoned to the futility almost of grimace, Mr. Chaikin wandered through the play as if subconsciously in search of a better cast. 

Barnes’s colleague at the Times, Walter Kerr, was curiously almost complimentary—he had hated Shaliko’s Ghosts the year before so much that Shapiro answered him back in the reviewer’s very own paper—remarking that

the very shaky Shaliko Company has here done better than customary work.  Apart from some flamboyant symbolism . . . the staging by Leonardo Shapiro is plain but graphic, the figures in this barren landscape could have come from a skilled if academic genre painter, and guest‐actor Joseph Chaikin in the central role is a decided bonus.

Mr. Chaikin, eyes red‐rimmed, mouth working convulsively whenever an interior rage overtakes him, moves from his early pontification to an ultimate animalism about as effectively as an actor can, I think, and is genuinely disturbing as he tries to rid himself of the bloody knife he cannot find water deep enough to hide.

In Long Island’s Newsday, Allan Wallach found that Chaikin’s Woyzeck was “persuasively played” as a “man who expresses his thoughts almost  stammeringly, his eyes rimmed with red, his smile fixed and empty, his movements limp and tentative until, when he commits the murder, they become almost spastic.”

A few days later, in the same paper, George Oppenheimer expressed the opposite opinion.  “The staging by the company’s director, Leonardo Shapiro, and the acting by its members reduce Buechner to incomprehensible gibberish,” he wrote. 

Ross Wetzsteon, the theater editor of the Village Voice, asked several reviewers each to write about the Shapiro-Chaikin Woyzeck, which he dubbed “the most eagerly anticipated production of the season.”  The “debate” was entitled “A Dream Production Falls Flat.”

Julius Novick:  Leonardo Shapiro’s production at the Public Theatre is literal and uninspired.  Worse, its rhythms are all wrong. . . .  Mr. Shapiro’s staging is slow and placid, with the scenes separated by discreet little flute-and-drum-accompanied blackouts that are fatal to the play’s necessary momentum.

[T]he confrontation [of Chaikin and Woyzeck] is a fizzle.  Mr. Chaikin is a cuddly, friendly actor, slightly built and fuzzy-haired, with a soft voice and soft contours. . . .  [H]e is unable to turn himself into jagged, violent Woyzeck.  He works away at it intelligently and conscientiously, with  staring eyes and slack jaw, angular scarecrow movements, and a stammer that develops into veritable seizures of inarticulacy; but in spite of all his efforts he remains essentially a teddy-bear.

Arthur Sainer:  I’m in an obvious minority among my Voice colleagues and the daily press concerning the virtues of the current production.  Despite director Leo Shapiro’s tendency to simplify what seems to me Buchner’s complex and sometimes contradictory vision . . . , I found Shapiro’s production in all its bareness a most compelling one.

First, there’s Joseph Chaikin’s masterly portrayal.  Joe’s Woyzeck is physically like a landscape overrun by the enemy: bruised, scorched, pockmarked; the tanks of the oppressor lie heavily on this terrain . . . .

Joe inhabits Woyzeck’s spirit with feelings of distress and compassion so harrowing that it sometimes becomes difficult to watch . . . .

I like much of what I would call the “dryness” of the Shaliko production. . . .  This dryness, this lack of resonance suggests that Woyzeck’s life is flying by as if in a dream.

What I find a problem is the multiplicity of styles. 

Ross Wetzsteon:  While Chaikin effectively conveys the sense of the fatefully tortured victim (though it must be said that with such an ineptly directed cast, he seems tortured by nothing more menacing than a gaggle of clowns), he utterly fails to convey any sense of complex consciousness.

Some performances give the exhilarating effect of a man walking a tightrope without a net—what’s missing here is not the net but the tightrope.

Terry Curtis Fox:  There is a moment, early in this production, when Chaikin stands stage-center and begins to stutter.  It is not just a moment of speech—the blocked mind causes the entire body to shudder, the tremble’s final emergence as comprehensible sound become the transformation of impulse by will.  It should, of course, be a major statement of character: the blocked Woyzeck released.  It isn’t.  The reason, I think, is that it is instantly recognizable as Chaikinesque shtick . . . .  [T]he power is missing because the rest of the Shaliko Company is not acting in anything approximating a similar style.

Shapiro’s troup[e] acts in an agitprop, caricaturist style which is wholly opposed to Chaikin’s performance:  Where Chaikin attempts to make the unfeeling human, the Shaliko actors drain all the feeling from their parts. . . .  Chaikin behaves like an imported actor doing a star turn in a company whose values differ significantly from his own.

Shapiro has developed neither metaphor nor mechanism.  He has merely given his company an idea of acting, been given by the presence of Joseph Chaikin an opposing idea of acting, and hoped that this clash would provide ample feeling for tragedy.  It doesn’t . . . .  Lacking sufficient control of the acting on stage, Shapiro loses control of the play.

Eileen Blumenthal:  Leo Shapiro’s direction aims at peopling the play in part with just . . . rich stage cartoons, and this strikes me as precisely the right way to deal with the expressionist elements of the play.  The approach is, of course, a fragile and difficult one, and at this point in the production several of the major cartoons have not quite hit their resonance.  But the production is still growing . . . and the cartoons are becoming richer.

And Chaikin’s performance is complex and arresting.  While he plays Woyzeck as a deeply pained, human character, he also gives him a subtle surreal dimension . . . which keeps Woyzeck in the same play as the cartoon-like drum-major, captain, and doctor.

[T]he production . . . probably errs slightly toward presentational—toward showing Woyzeck and his world rather than inhabiting them. 

Erika Munk:  I’m not priggish about the inviolability of scripts—but if you want to mess around with Buchner, you better be Alban Berg.  This production makes a multitude of pointless or condescending changes . . . but there are three crucial distortions: Marie’s character, the role her child plays, and a passive simplification of Woyzeck’s nature.

. . . I think [the distortion] means that while this production might come up with some affection for dead women, it has no use for live ones.

This lengthy critical exchange somewhat exercised Chaikin and he wrote to Wetzsteon (who wrote back).  Referring to the Voice article’s headline, the actor wrote:

It is important for me to make clear that doing Woyzeck was not my dream. . . .  Woyzeck was among six or seven plays which I’ve always found compelling and I hoped that a circumstance would arise, or that I might bring one about, to make it possible to work on—either directing or acting.

Chaikin also said:

The idea of a symposium was a good one, but having “the most eagerly anticipated production of the season” was bound to bring out the sourness even more than otherwise.  I want also to make clear that I feel that there are many weaknesses in the production and in my performance.  In any case, it was a good idea to take many views, but under the heading “Chaikin’s Dream” I experience it as obscene journalism.

To be accurate, Wetzsteon didn’t call the production “Chaikin’s Dream” exactly.  “A Dream Production Falls Flat,” the headline, seems to me to refer not to a dream the actor had, but to one the Voice writers had—or the potential audience for the production—entertaining a vision of the actor’s return to the stage after so long a hiatus in a role seemingly perfect for him.

Now, a tag line above the article’s title did read “theatre: chaikin’s woyzeck,” so Chaikin could be excused if he felt the headline was addressed to him.

We know, incidentally, that Chaikin wasn’t entirely happy with the work on Woyzeck.  He alludes to some weaknesses in his performance, and in a Drama Review article that came out in 1981, the actor confessed:

It wasn’t so comfortable with Leo Shapiro in Wozzeck [sic].  I think Leo is very interesting, and gifted, and it’s not to do with him, but it’s to do with our relationship and that particular material.  I felt if I had an opinion, he had not to regard it because it wasn’t his idea.  I had to stop having opinions.  And he’s a very able director.  I think it was a bind we got into.

It should be noted, though, that in an earlier TDR interview, Chaikin attributed his reluctance to offer opinions not so much to Shapiro’s attitude as to his own fears that because the cast knew him as a prominent director, his ideas would, first, be accepted too easily or, second, be entirely ignored.

In another statement, Chaikin felt that, in comparison to two performances after Woyzeck—his collaboration with Sam Shepard in 1979, Tongues and his and Steven Kent’s adaptation of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing in 1981—he was constrained by the material:

I would have liked to have (had) the same elbow room with Wozzeck as I had with Texts and Tongues in that it’s an unfinished play. . . .   I’m so drawn to the play, but when I was finally doing it, it was just so unrelentingly dark and windowless.

Indeed, Chaikin expressed trepidations about the decision to do the production: “In the beginning, I felt awful about doing it.  At first, I thought it was a real compromise . . . .”

Wetzsteon responded almost three weeks later:

I’m sorry you were so upset about our coverage of “Woyzeck,” in particular that you put so much emphasis on the headline rather than the concept.

The Voice editor defended the use of the term “most anticipated event” and apologized for the headline that had so disturbed Chaikin.  He emphasized, however, “that the important decision was to have a number of critical sensibilities . . . write about this production.”

To return to the press response to the Shaliko-Other Theatre Woyzeck, Marilyn Stasio, writing in Cue magazine (a well-regarded New York entertainment weekly absorbed into New York magazine in 1980), said the play “happens to play like thunder.”  Stasio explained:

Shapiro uses a fluid, almost nonchalant staging technique to relate the story . . . .The tight company . . . slips lithely in and out of its shadowy character roles, conveying with wonderfully economic strokes Büchner’s savage satiric portraits of 19th-century society.

“Joseph Chaikin’s Woyzeck functions as the magnetic focal point of this impressive production,” wrote the Cue writer. 

Confining the poor doomed devil’s humanity to his eyes, Chaikin shrinks his body into a beaten-down, shuffling wreck.  He is Brecht’s Schweik brought to his knees, Chaplin’s tramp crushed by a joke suddenly turned ugly and unfunny.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Charles Ryweck affirmed that “‘Woyzeck’ emerges, in Joseph Papp’s presentation of the Shaliko Company’s production . . . as little more than of perfunctory interest to other than confirmed theatre buffs.”  Ryweck specified that “Leonard[o] Shapiro . . . has not notably helped to bring into focus this admittedly fragmentary play with his non-theatrical direction.” 

The production, the HR reviewer did feel, “is distinguished by the performance of Joseph Chaikin . . . who captures beautifully this trampled upon, desperate little man with intimations of the unleashed demons lurking inside him.”

“The cumulative effect [of the play] should be devastating,” thought the New Yorker’s Edith Oliver.  “But this performance is elaborate and glum and muddled and entirely lacking in the dramatist’s irony; it is also poorly acted by almost everyone in the company.” 

The “almost” in Oliver’s assessment of the acting was apparently a reference to Chaikin, who, the New Yorker review-writer attested, “plays [Woyzeck] with eloquence, most of that eloquence being physical.”

He walks with an odd, shambling gait, like a puppet.  His face, most of the time, is numb and expressionless and his eyes nearly unfocused; suddenly they blaze with overwhelming feeling—hurt or anger.  He shuffles along and then abruptly stops, sensing a movement in the earth beneath him or seeing a vision of blazing light in the sky.  All of the character is in every muscle of his body, and when he speaks, he speaks to a purpose.  None of his lines go to waste.

Harold Clurman, the great 20th-century director and sometime reviewer, described the Public Theater production in The Nation thus:

The more or less young people of the Shaliko Co. under Leonardo Shapiro’s direction present the play on a tier of bare wooden platforms in an expressionism veering between horrifically crude vaudeville and impassioned shouting, with all but two of the actors playing a variety of parts.

Clurman added, “Despite the limitation of means at the company’s disposal and the general patchiness of the attack, manifesting more dedication and ambitious purpose than finished execution, the production registers; one remembers it.”

Of Chaikin’s work, the Nation reviewer observed that he “enacts Woyzeck with a make-up of bloodstained deprivation in a fashion which shows marks of Grotowski training.  He throws himself into the part with sustained physical and vocal energy of unusual ferocity, versatility and clarity of intention.”

Back in the ’70s, there were many press outlets, both newspapers and magazines, that were significant critical voices in New York theater, but either no longer exist (Cue, from which I quoted above, is an example) or are no longer important to theater coverage.  Another one of these was the Women’s Wear Daily (which now publishes as an online magazine under the title WWD—the original paper’s nickname—but doesn’t post theater reviews).

Reviewer Christopher Sharp reported that “the production succeeds in translating Buchner’s powers of narration and poetry onto the stage.”  Sharp admonished that “those who are interested in seeing this forerunner of modern drama to rush to Lafayette St. before this fine production goes away.”

“Chaikin has the perfect look and build for Woyzeck,” asserted Sharp.  “There is a fire in his eyes that clashes against his awkward movements.”

The WWD reviewer concluded, “One gets the impression from this production that we are seeing the play from Woyzeck’s point of view.  The scenes are short and abrupt, and they flicker on the stage like bad cinematography.  There is little doubt that Woyzeck sees images in this way.”

In the Record of suburban Bergen County, New Jersey, Emory Lewis dubbed the NYSF production “both flawed and fascinating at the same time.”  He continued, “Leonardo Shapiro . . . has staged ‘Woyzeck’ with careful attention to its offbeat style.  He choreographs every movement.  In his vision, the parable becomes a dance of death.”

“The actors are superb,” declared Lewis.  “They use their bodies with great skill.  Obviously they all have been thoroughly trained in acrobatics.  Most sing and play instruments.”

Of the lead actor, the Record reviewer found, “Joseph Chaikin . . . is magnificent.  He captures the lost quality of Woyzeck . . . .  I like the way he seems to move in several directions at the same time.”

William J. Raidy of the now-defunct Long Island Press, locally known as the LIP, labeled the NYSF production “a fine revival” with “Joseph Chaikin turning in a superb performance.”  Raidy added, “The Shaliko company, while perhaps making ‘Woyzeck’ too contemporary in its adaptation, has caught much of the outcry and almost comic-tragedy of Buchner’s drama . . . .”  The LIP reviewer explained the former remark as referring to “a few dramatic tricks I feel are not right for the original spirit of this 19th century . . . drama . . . .”

“Leonardo Shapiro has directed this production of ‘Woyzeck’ as if the players were some sort of toys or torn rag dolls,” Raidy reported, continuing that “for the most part, the production works very well.  It is certainly enhanced by Chaikin’s touching performance . . . .”

The LIP journalist felt that “Mr. Chaikin’s an exceptionally gifted performer and for his presence alone, I would recommend a visit to ‘Woyzeck.’”

In addition to the exchange of letters between Chaikin and Ross Wetzsteon of the Village Voice, Chaikin received appreciative letters from spectators.  Two that were preserved include one from an Off-Broadway director and producer who financed the historic 1961 St. Mark’s Playhouse production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks, drama teacher and playwright Geraldine Lust (1920-87).

Lust also directed plays for the Living Theatre and conducted workshops and directed for the Open Theater.  Having studied directing under Lee Strasberg and helped launch Stella Adler’s acting school, Lust wrote on 25 March 1976:

[I] am delighted that [Clive Barnes] appreciated the commitment of your performance.

It is still haunting me, and I am still afraid for Woyzeck’s soul.  If there is any way, during the run of the play that I might see it again . . ., I’d love to.

Distinguished playwright Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931), who, by 1976 had already won an Obie and been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Foundation grants, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Creative Artists Public Service grant, was a member of the downtown theater scene (many of her early plays were produced at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village). 

On 26 March, she dropped Chaikin a hand-written note:  “I’ll always remember your performance in Woyzeck.”  She added a request: “Wish you’d do my plays some times [sic] even though they’re old.” 

(Chaikin would, in fact, direct one of Kennedy’s plays: in 1995, he staged A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White at the Signature Theatre in New York City.)

In the early days of his company, Shapiro advocated touring and participating in theater festivals.  Indeed, taking productions to festivals around the world had a special importance for Shapiro.  “It’s important to me for the same reason  that having a company is important to me,” he explained: “To be a citizen and to find some way to have some base in which I can say something about the way things are done.” 

After the NYSF production of Woyzeck ran at the Public, Shapiro took it abroad to the Holland Festival.  The production played at the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam from 8 to 22 June 1976.  (He even took the scaffolding idea with him: the New York supplier picked up its material, as Shapiro had wished, and “[w]hen the show went to Europe, I got scaffolding there.”)

We’ve heard after the fact how Chaikin identified disappointments in his performance in Woyzeck.  Shapiro did, too.  Some years after the production, the director wrote: “Our Woyzeck was softer than I would have liked.  Our Usurer wasn’t Jewish.  Woyzeck stabbed Marie with a rubber knife.” 

Following the run of Woyzeck, Shapiro disbanded The Shaliko Company.  The two actors in the troupe about whom he cared most, he explained, Mary Zakrzewski (who played Margaret, Marie and Woyzeck’s neighbor and Marie’s friend) and Chris McCann (b. 1953; Andres, Woyzeck’s fellow soldier, friend, and confidant), had left Shaliko following the run.  The two had been among the original core of actors Shapiro had recruited four years earlier to form the new company.  

After disbanding the company, Shapiro decided to try his hand at freelance directing, starting in December 1976 at the Public with The Youth Hostel, part of a workshop of three one-act plays by Wallace Shawn (b. 1943). 

Shapiro and composer Margaret Pine (b. 1948), another of Shaliko’s original members, had developed a musical version of Molière’s Misanthrope.  Shapiro brought it to Papp to produce and the impresario agreed.  Eventually, Papp and Shapiro argued over several aspects of the production.  Shapiro refused to make changes and Papp fired him after the preview on 6 October 1977. 

Thus ended Shapiro’s association with NYSF—and opened a rift between the director and the producer that never healed.  When Shapiro re-formed Shaliko, he had to find a new home.  He connected with La MaMa herself, Ellen Stewart (1919-2011), and the troupe worked out of La MaMa E.T.C. for its last decade of producing—and Shapiro established the Trinity/La MaMa Performing Arts Program, his teaching program from 1986 to 1992 with Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, there as well.

[Only occasionally do I append a list of sources with a post, but it seems useful and interesting in this case to catalogue all the press coverage for the Shaliko-NYSF-Other Theatre  Woyzeck.  Here’s my bibliography for Leonardo Shapiro’s Woyzeck:

• Albrecht, Ernest. “Runway show never quite gets of ground.” Home News [New Brunswick, NJ] 25 Mar. 1976: 37.
• Barnes, Clive. “Stage: ‘Woyzeck’ Revived.” New York Times 25 March 1976: 43.
• Clurman, Harold. “Theatre.” Review of Woyzeck. Nation 10 Apr. 1976: [445-]46.
• Gold, Sylviane. “A Shell of a Play.” New York Post 25 March 1976: 17.
• Guernsey, Otis L., Jr. Curtain Times: The New York Theater: 1965-1987. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1987. 340 [passing mention]
• Hill, Holly. “Classics of 19th century good off-Broadway fare.” Reporter Dispatch [Westchester Rockland Newspapers, White Plains, NY] 5 April 1976, sec. B: 6.  [Same review appeared in other chain papers under different headlines.]
• Jenner, Cynthia Lee. “Disastrous Ego Trip.” Villager [New York] 1 April 1976: 6, 15.
• Kellman, Alice J. “Joseph Chaikin the Actor.” Drama Review 20.3 (T71: Sept. 1976): 17-26.
• Kerr, Walter. “Theater: Stage View: The Trouble With ‘Woyzeck.’” New York Times 4 April 1976, sec. D: 1, 5.
• Klein, Barbara. “‘Woyzeck’ a Waste.” Paterson News [Paterson, NJ] 25 Mar. 1976: 30.
• Lawrence, Linda. “Neatly staged work lacks feeling.” Chelsea Clinton News [New York] 1 April 1976: 15.
• Lester, Elenore. “‘I Am The Audience In Action.’” New York Times 7 Mar. 1976, sec. 2 (“Arts and Leisure”):  5, 34.
• Lewis, Emory. “Lively Arts: ‘Woyzeck’ engrossing.” The Record [Hackensack, NJ] 25 March 1976, sec. B: 18.
• Malcolm, Tom. “‘Woyzeck’ Fails To Satisfy.” Montclarion [Montclair State College, Upper Montclair, NJ] 23 Apr. 1976: 12.
• Mullen, Ron. “off-broadway: ‘Woyzeck.’” Where It’s At [New York City] 5.15 (12 Apr. 1976): 16, 18, 20.
• Oliver, Edith. “Off Broadway: ‘Woyzeck,’ Sort Of.” New Yorker 5 April 1976: 96, 98.
• Oppenheimer, George. “Theater/II: An Enchanting Evening, by Jove!” Newsday [Melville, NY] 4 April 1976, part II: 9, 21.
• Pegnato, Lisa J. “Breathing in a Different Zone: Joseph Chaikin.” Drama Review 25.3 (T91: Fall 1981): 7-18.
• Rabkin, Gerald. “The Human Beast.” Soho Weekly News [New York] 1 April 1976: 32-33.
• Raidy, William A. “First Nighter: ‘Woyzeck’ fascinating drama.” Long Island Press [Jamaica, NY] 25 March 1976, “Everyday Magazine”: 14.
• Rojo, Jerry. “Interview: Jerry Rojo: Environmental Theatre.” Performing Arts Journal 1.1 (Spring 1976): 20-28.
• Ryweck, Charles. “Stage Review: Woyzeck.” Hollywood Reporter 31 Mar. 1976: 6.
• Sainer, Arthur. “How Is It Going to Come Together?” Village Voice [New York] 11-17 March [1976]: 141, 143.
• S[ainer], A[rthur]. “Voice Centerfold: Chaikin Puts ‘Woyzeck’ Together.” Village Voice [New York] 15 Mar. 1978: 60-61.
• Schechter, Joel. “American Dramaturgs.” Drama Review 20.2 (T70: June 1976): 88-92.
• Sharp, Christopher. “The Theater: ‘Woyzeck.’” Women’s Wear Daily [New York] 25 March 1976: 11.
• Stasio, Marilyn. “Chaikin Says ‘Yes’ to ‘Woyzeck.’” Cue [New York] 10 April 1976: 21-22.
• Stasio, Marilyn. “Reviews: Theatre: The Vision.” Cue [New York] 3 April 1976: 10.
• Wallach, Allan. “In Review/II: Stage: A universe so desolate.” Newsday [Melville, NY] 25 March 1976, sec. A: 8-9.
• Watt, Douglas. “Overdoing the dumb act.” Daily News [New York] 25 March 1976: 92.
• Watts, Richard. “The Week in Theater: ‘Vanities’ Looks at Three Women.” New York Post 29 March 1976: 42.
• Wetzsteon, Ross; Julius Novick; Arthur Sainer, Terry Curtis Fox; Ellen Blumenthal, and Erika Munk, “Theatre: Chaikin’s Woyzeck: A Dream Production Falls Flat.” Village Voice [New York] 5 April 1976: 123-24. 

 [There are 32 articles above, including 24 reviews.  The rest are interviews and other kinds of reports.  Some of these periodicals have online archives, like the New York Times, but some only permit access to subscribers; others don’t go back as far as 1976.  (I’ve quoted from other sources that aren’t on this list, articles and interviews that aren’t specifically about Woyzeck.  Some of these are recorded interviews I conducted and others are unpublished typescripts, neither of which are available publicly.)

[Libraries will have collections of some of the titles above, most notably the New York Public Library (which keeps some in different locations, such as Women’s Wear Daily in the Science, Industry, and Business Library, Cue and the Hollywood Reporter at the Library for the Performing Arts, and the New York Times, Daily News, and New York Post at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.  Some of the above reviews and articles are only available as clippings in the files of the LPA at NYPL. 

[Other libraries, such as university libraries, will have smaller collections and may restrict access,  I can only tell you that at the time I gathered this material when I was doing the research, in the years before the Internet, it took me months and years to assemble this collection.  Of course, I didn’t have a handy list off of which to work.]