On The Woyzeck Project

On The Woyzeck Project

William Daddario, George McConnell, Stephanie Lein-Walseth, Joanne Zerdy

Will: Experimental Theatre is a superbly frustrating concept, and maybe that's the case because both the "Experimental" and the "Theatre" require more elaboration. Put another way: experimental theatre, in general, means and does nothing. At worst it is a label, frequently applied haphazardly, that sticks to groups and performances as radically different in their aesthetic as Bread and Puppet Theatre, The Wooster Group, and Harold Pinter. In that capacity as a label, the term "experimental theatre" elides important differences of aesthetics, acting styles, materials used, and performance spaces. By stitching together different performance types and erasing their differences, the label "experimental theatre" becomes its own worst enemy as it denies what it should foster, i.e. Difference. The result is the formation of a concept that circulates widely but only installs dread in those it approaches. That this is true I can attest to, since for four years at NYU I told people I met that I was in the "Experimental Theatre Wing" and the facial expressions shot back to me were, to put it mildly, unpleasant. They were faces akin to the "I'm washing my hair" response proffered by people attempting to avoid dates. "Oh, that sounds interesting....maybe I'll come see one of your shows..."

Of course, experimental theatre can also refer to an extremely dynamic process. In a product-oriented world, this type of theatre can introduce an entirely unheard of concept into people's lives. That concept is simple, we've all probably heard it used casually before: The process is the thing; the getting there is the best part of travel; the making love is the best part, much more so than the having-done-it. Experimental theatre can become a super intense event into which we enter without knowing where it will take us. To offer the process as the performance is certainly not a new idea, but it has not lost the ability to provoke thought and incite emotional extremes. But, then again, sometimes a presentation of process falls flat. If you pay $50 to see process, you may very well get upset. If you love punch lines, you won't settle for simply "knock, knock." In terms of commercial theatre, shows advertising process frequently lead us back to the bad date scenario: "Yeah, I had a lot of fun....but I won't be able to see you again because I'm moving to..um..Bulgaria tomorrow, so..sorry." Not even a kiss on the cheek.

It's only when we start talking about specific elements of experimental theatre that we start getting somewhere. For those who think that shows of the experimental ilk resist all modes of critique, or that they require no after-thought because their effervescent intoxication says it all, I would like to suggest the exact opposite. Theatre in which experimentation is the driving motor requires careful attention to detail and, more than that, it demands us to ask questions. In fact, by asking questions we, as audience, become part of the piece, which raises the stakes and presents the theatre performance in question with an opportunity to blow our minds with responses to those questions. Critical engagement with experimental theatre is really a massive component of the art form, since it was a critical engagement with "traditional" theatre that spawned people like Jerzy Grotowski, Maria Irene-Fornes, and numerous others to break away from the pack in the first place. If that experimental theatre piece happens to be part of an academic institution, well, then we have even more reason to ask questions and poke at the play with a pointed stick a few times because we are learning something from it. It is presented as experimental education, not just as experimental theatre.

The Woyzeck Project offers us just such an opportunity. I met with some graduate students, a couple of who worked on the show, and we sat around for an hour posing questions, applauding certain things, and deducing consequences from the orgy of imagery that this performance offered to the community over the last two weeks. Here is a distillation of that hour-long conversation.

The first realization we had as a group was twofold. One: none of us could say what the driving force was in the show. Two: we weren't completely sure there was supposed to be a driving force. Was this production a further elaboration from last year's One-Day-Only performance? Was it remaining faithful to George Buchner's text? Was it informed by Alban Berg's opera? Was there a kernel packed deep inside the chaotic field house environment that all of us failed to pop? Or, were we supposed to let the whole thing wash over us and take us out to sea?

It was suggested that one central idea in the performance was that each person in the audience should see the world of the play through the eyes of Woyzeck. This thought, however, provoked us to re-visit Buchner's themes, as we understood them. For Woyzeck, the well-ordered world of military bureaucracy and single-file marching doesn't make sense. For Woyzeck, that world appears as severe, violent, and abusive. When he "goes crazy" things start to make more sense for him. Woyzeck's paranoia and jealousy begin to craft another world for him, one that by our standards today looks whacked out and strange but to Woyzeck may have looked far better than the military world he was faced with. This aligns, to some extent, with the Sturm und Drang movement in Germany from which Buchner appeared. Along with other playwrights, Buchner wrote plays that tried to break away from the well-made play format, which appeared to him as the discursive equivalent of the military. Instead of prose, clear narratives, and a five-act structure, why not use poetic language and fragmentation to produce another type of theatrical experience? Why adhere to the so-called unities of time and place when so many experiences in life have nothing to do with unification?

The outcome of our re-visitation was this: to present a production through the eyes of Woyzeck would be to present a shift in perspective as Woyzeck departs from the strange world of the military into the more sensible world of madness. Madness for Woyzeck is more pleasing. This is complicated. How does a designer show a well-ordered world as off-kilter and a world of madness as something pleasing? The transition from one world to the other is a challenge for theatre designers and performers, but it would be rewarding for an audience who might usually equate madness with disorder. Unfortunately, The Woyzeck Project presented neither the transition nor the stark contrast between the two worlds. The most dynamic part of the design, in my opinion, was the sound, which created white noise out of asyncopated rhythms and distorted vocal segments. This created a feeling in me that something wasn't quite right, but that feeling never matured because the sonic landscape stayed at the same volume and intensity throughout the piece. The sound and the visual components of the design faded together into a gray mush, from which I could not distinguish any of the nuanced series of actions performed by the cast.

George: I have so far seen 57 different performances in 2008. I saw Woyzeck twice. I am not a lazy audience member. I come to a piece expecting to be challenged and I'm ready to work. I'm ready to go where it takes me, and I'm ready to resist if I think where it wants to take me needs resisting. I absolutely do not believe that an audience needs to be spoon-fed or pandered to. I am not a fan of the proscenium theatre. In a proscenium theatre, however, the rules for the audience are clear and I can either decide to play by those rules or not.



With Woyzeck, the audience seemed an afterthought when it should have been the first aspect of the performance that was considered. How are we casting the audience? If we are expecting them to play a role that they are not accustomed to, how do we build their "cues" into our performance? If in fact the idea was to give each audience member the experience of being Woyzeck, then everything should have started from the thought, "How will the audience move through this space as Woyzeck?" We begin with being herded on the steps by Allison speaking with a German accent. Ok, so the rule is established that the performers will direct us. This then is reinforced when Allison tells us to enter into the building. Ok, repetition has taught me the rules of engagement. Once inside the building, this convention was dropped and only returned--in a slightly different form--when I was dragged by the performers into the cage to dance with them. If the point was to free the audience into a self-driven exploration of the piece in a way that conventional performances do not allow, that was lost by this direct manipulation of my body. The opening set with Allison and the dance/dragging seem like bookends that contradict the middle "peep show" self-directed section.



Quite simply, I did not feel like Woyzeck. I felt like I watched several performers "act" crazy in a non-specific manner. As an educational opportunity, I think we see the value of experimentation materialized and need to carefully think about what aspects of the production worked and which did not. Theatre is an assemblage of conventions. If a production wants to explore new conventions, then it needs to clearly establish them. It is fine to present the audience with something that they need to work to figure out, but there is then a responsibility on the part of the production to have figured some things out also.



In improv, it is called "passing the creative buck" to constantly ask questions of your partner. It puts all of the creative responsibility on them to advance the scene, and if you are the kind of improv partner who passes the creative buck, you do not take your responsibility for advancing the scene. I felt that the production ultimately passed the creative buck too often onto the audience without taking responsibility for doing so. Ideally, all of the creative impetus would not fall on the shoulders of the production or the audience, but would be a shared exchange between them. (I feel like the attitude of the production was, "Ok, we made something, you tell us what it is. You deal with it. We don't really know what we've got here." Not, "We made this, and we think it is this, what do you think? Oh really, well, we hadn't thought of that, but we did think of this...")



Stephanie: As I walked to the performance with my decidedly non-theater-person husband, my repeated mantra was “don’t worry about trying to ‘get it.’” Based on my experience at Master and Margarita two years earlier, I knew that dogged attempts to impose or determine a traditional narrative structure frustrated my ability to fully comprehend what the piece might have been trying to achieve. I needed to re-frame the experience in order to open up other possibilities, and not worrying about ‘getting it’ seemed like a good beginning. Going in with a more open/exploratory framework, I was surprised to find that The Woyzeck Project seemed, by and large, to be a multifaceted, multisensory exploration of one primary relationship: Woyzeck and Marie’s entangled love affair and violent demise. While the whole of the performance was loosely woven together in ways that often eluded my understanding, I could easily comprehend many of the vignettes as investigating the pathos, fear, lust, and insanity of this relationship. The performers commendably threw themselves into these explorations, making themselves physically violent and vulnerable, extending to dark depths not often found in the confines of the proscenium arch.

What I missed from last year’s showing, though, was a bit more contextual framing from Buchner’s script. Not, necessarily, for the sake of narrative comfortability and being able to clearly define a beginning, middle, and end, but rather as an indication of the larger forces at work in and on Woyzeck and Marie’s relationship. The military’s omnipotent, oppressive, and regimented presence was especially missing as a dominant force. (I assume that the dancers jogging through in their matching uniforms were meant to loosely invoke a military feel, but in their likeness to athletes (especially given that we were in a fieldhouse) the connection, and more importantly, the stakes, were diminished.) The scientific experimentation that Woyzeck undergoes crops up in only one of the brief vignettes, and the drum major whose affair with Marie leads, in part, to her murder, is only present in the puppet show at the beginning of the performance. In last year’s performance all of these elements seemed to weigh heavily and visibly on the final outcome, the existential turmoil and futility of life oozing out of Woyzeck as he plunged the knife repeatedly into his lover, an act that seemed both one of rage and compassion as he freed her from the misery of the earthly realm. This is not to say that in creating a performance piece, the lens should never be focused down to the psychological realm or dwell in the internal workings of the mind. Beckett, for one, does this quite convincingly. My point, rather, is that without either the specificity of this particular relationship or the broader conditions that make it possible, we may be left to read this murder as another generically vague case of “angry/crazy man kills girlfriend.”

I wonder also about the proximity of the audience to the performers. While it excites me to move through a space in ways impossible in traditional theater settings, I’m left puzzling through questions about its impact and efficacy. Are we meant to experience what the characters are by way of brushing up against them? Or are we simply voyeurs with a shorter distance to gaze across? Are our bodies meant to take on the fear and anguish of Woyzeck and Marie, or are we implicated as part of a mob that watches the violence and does nothing? Are we supposed to intervene in the action? Or would that unproductively disrupt the performance?

In addition to all of these thoughts and questions, I definitely had moments during the production of exhilaration and excitement, akin to the kind I’ve experienced at rock concerts. I realize that what the directors, designers, performers, and technicians have created here is something unique, something that is drawing the attention of local and national theater figures. And I feel pleased and privileged to be a part of the department that is engaging in projects like this. I offer all of these comments in the spirit of appreciation and with an eye to help defining just what that “something special” is and can be.


Joanne:
I like space--thinking about it, theorizing it, imagining it, and trying to stage it in creative and complicated ways. I also think that space should be an extremely important facet of any theatrical production; and we should ask questions of how a performance event uses, restricts, expands, collides, exploits, refines, and creates spaces---particularly those that, like my colleagues have already mentioned, take place outside of a proscenium frame [though it should be at the forefront of staging in this configuration, too]. When productions endeavor to take us out of the comfortable seats of a defined theatre venue and to urge us to help create some of these provocative spaces, I appreciate the invitation and find myself committed to doing my part to fulfill the request. So, after seeing last year's one-night-only Woyzeck event and then speaking to various people associated with this year's undertaking, I was excited by what the performers, directors and designers would present for our involvement.

I liked that we stood outside, waiting, unsure of when or how the performance would begin and how we were supposed to take part. Like George, though, I was confused about the tone set and about our configuration. Were we supposed to feel like a harmonious, unified group that was forced apart once inside? Was our collective singing meant to teach us part of the story we would encounter inside? Neither the content nor our arrangement in this opening became clear to me as the show progressed. Given the structure of the multiple performances [I saw the show during an 8 pm slot--sandwiched between two other rounds of performance], would there have been a way to utilize the outdoor space more effectively? Setting up a few performance areas--established by actors, objects or sound--that we then walked around or through would have highlighted our need to move about and choose our path once we entered the main performance area inside.

Upon entering the field house and making our way downstairs, I felt excited by the prospect of how we might engage with the next area of performance. And we found a puppet show waiting for us. I found it curious that in that large hallway space, we were, once again, being asked to focus, consolidate our attention to a single viewpoint. And again, our bodies clustered cozily together (as opposed to be forced together), we watched an engaging, humorous and informative performance unfold. It ended and we stood. And waited. And waited. This moment felt more like a lull in the action than a pregnant pause--the rest of the hall space felt empty and uninteresting. Was this the point?

Before entering the main room, we moved through a predominantly domestic space filled with household objects and eerie recorded sounds that, without dialogue, effectively communicated one of the threads of the story: the Woyzeck/Marie relationship, as Stephanie points out above. The arrangment of objects in this space forced our bodies to move in single-file as we made our way passed the ironing board and observed the women confined in lockers--moving closer and closer to the source of a thumping music/noise soundscape. Inside, we encountered a dozen different kinds of spaces--many at least partially confined, others that sought to unify these bits. Although it felt like we were being positioned as voyeurs--with a huge, frightening eye watching our actions from above--I felt somewhat unconnected. I could choose to look into the peep holes or to wander around--to peek over walls or to ignore them. While the ironing board shaped our encounter with the space in a particular way, here I felt removed from the action. I wanted to feel thrust into the story, to feel confined within these events and these walls--to perhaps understand how various institutions and social structures can drive one crazy--if not to murder--but I didn't. This isn't to say that the performers didn't create poignant moments or that vignettes weren't engaging to watch--but the overall environment didn't allow for a nuanced understanding of some of the driving forces that shape the story. Like my colleagues above, I feel that because this production is working to offer a different possibility for what theatre can be--and taking place within an educational institution--I feel that it deserves the thoughtful responses that we have tried to give.