'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.]

'Woyzeck' (The Shaliko Company, 1976) – Part 1

[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).

(Neither Woyzeck nor Leonce and Lena has ever played Broadway.  Productions of Danton’s Death were mounted by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre in 1938 and at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1965; Reinhardt’s production of Dantons Tod played in 1927-28 in German at the Century Theatre.) 

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.’”  Papp wouldn’t let him because he felt it was anti-Semitic.  

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.]