Space Odyssey

NO ONE COULD ACCUSE Gregg Lachow and the other makers of Woyzeck of getting inadvertantly lost in mainstage space. They are in love with it. Stepping inside, the audience ventures almost shyly onto a vast Siberian wasteland, its cellophane spaces crackling with emptiness, its border indistinct. Mountains of some synthetic material rim the flatness of every available inch of the hall's acres of aisle and plank; throughout the production, unexpected portions of this flatness rise and fall, thrusting the landscape of events into strange non-Euclidean configurations. A friend of the production has advanced the hypothesis that Lachow conceived the whole thing as an experiment in topology. It's possible. Ruling out any element of interpretation of Woyzeck would likely prove limiting.

The play itself makes such unusual demands of a director that a sweeping, radical interpretation seems called for. When George Buchner wrote the "script" in 1837 (as is prominently heralded on the programs, perhaps to forestall suspicions of yet another strange modern experiment), he neglected to finish or polish his work, arrange the scenes in any particular order, or denote a beginning, middle or end. With no setting, no scene transitions and no unified plot. Woyzeck would seem--if it takes place anywhere--to unroll in the center of a cavernous emptiness. So it does at the Loeb, but this emptiness has substance and tangible form.

Empty space, in fact, becomes one of the focal points for this strange succession of happenings, lending the voyage from scene to scene more excitement, more obvious purpose, than the scenes themselves. The latter do seem in fact to concern a a man named Woyzeck (the name rings repetitively through the various modes of address, a ghostly refrain), a soldier, who has been forced to eat nothing but peas for months in the interests of science. Who shaves his Captain's beard daily in return for disjointed grilling on philosophy and morals. Who kills a woman and may, or may not, get caught. Sentences, conversations repeat constantly, occasionally inaudible but more often reinforcing the plaintive refrain of "no communication." "Say something, Woyzeck," "Say something, Marie," come the incantations as apocryphal scenes--of singles bars, of children at play, of cynical audience reaction--glide past. Nothing really ruptures the silence.

Silences are Lachow's strong point, the currency which proves this is no amateur mess of enigma but a clearly thought out puzzle to decipher. The gaps in a script which at times seem one big gap do not interfere with the production's authoritative, screne flow towards a goal that, though a mystery to the watcher, clearly exists for those on stage. All but the most sophisticated audiences--say, those who have read Buchner and his theories and went to see Lachow's earlier Woyzeck on Exhibit at the Ex--may find themselves frustrated if they try to guess at precisely what Lachow and Co. think this goal is.

WHETHER INACCESSIBILITY is a weakness in such a show seems rather a moot question; the debate this spring may be waged in the Loeb box office, but presumably no audience reserves the right to be conventionally enthralled or illuminated, as long as a production can pique the senses and stay uneasily in the mind as do Woyzeck's visually masterful sequences. The way Jamie Hanes, as Woyzeck, stares defeatedly at a surrealistically huge bowl of peas, munches some, then bows his head in acceptance and dread, carries its power with it; marooned in cellophone wastes with his huge silhouette thrown on a scrim, Hanes need not operate otherwise in recognizable patterns. Kim Burrough as Marie, in some ways a more pivotal persons than Woyzeck, forges a character tied more closely to those events that are seen, but her physical presence remains objectively active and exciting outside scenery, outside plot.

The astounding lighting design by Jon Monderer does more than any other one element to give Lachow's spaces their sinuous magic. Rimming a long swing that sweeps a child in and out of view, shining up through two rectangular-grills to denote barracks for Woyzeck and a comrade. Monderer's lights and shadows and hellish pink sunsets need no narrative to make them shocking. Now and then they steal the center of attention completely, and Woyzeck becomes a story told entirely in light, without words, an aural equivalent of the children's show Laserium. Words here do not tell, they sigh and flicker: and the ancestry they bring out in us is less monkey than moth.