'Nature Unidealized, Transmogrified Humans'

In the opening scene of the ART's latest production, a boorish captain implores his barber-orderly, Johann Christian Woyzeck, to slow down while shaving him: "Not so fast, one thing after another. You're making me quite dizzy." The orderly, a fidgety and anxious troll of a man, paces back and forth in the spotlight, etching out the confines of the circle. Surrounded by darkness, he nervously darts to his washbowl and glances out into the audience with a fearful and ominous visage. Woyzeck cannot and will not slow down.

And neither will Marcus Stern's production of Woyzeck at the American Repertory Theater. Based on a series of fragments by the German playwright, Georg Buchner, the work was hailed as the first truly modern play when it first appeared on stage, some eighty years after it had been written in 1836. The last work Buchner worked on before he died of influenza at twenty-three, the collection of vignettes was performed to great success in 1913 in Germany. The stark Woyzeck diagnosed and condemned the nation's sick soul at a time characterized by psychoanalysis and introspection.

The play's action traces the descent into madness and furtive attempts at self defense of the title character, a soldier with an unfaithful wife and illegitimate child. Woyzeck is beaten up, experimented on and tortured until he snaps back, turning on the one thing he loves, his wife. His progression of distrust and anger leads him not only to doubt, but also to succumb slowly and miserably under a tide of filth and oppression.

But even if Buchner's vignettes themselves are unconventional, director Marcus Stern refuses to leave them alone. Sped up to the pace of an action movie, Gideon Lester's new translation of Woyzeck is as beaten and pushed around as its title character. The ART warps and distorts any semblance of coherence within the play. The production races through over twenty-five scenes in under sixty minutes, scarcely allowing the audience to breathe, let alone to analyze or reflect. Woyzeck (Thomas Derrah) drops through trap-doors, dashes up ladders and circles the stage. Scene changes resemble film cuts; music clips and sound effects disorient the audience MTV-style. The production behaves as a curious machine, moving in various, divergent directions.

The rapid-fire production makes impossible the emotional or psychological depth vital to such a piece. Shifting moods and genres so rapidly, Woyzeck leaves little with which to identify or empathize; it frustrates the audience more than it maintains their gaze.

The production leaves little room for talented acting. When Woyzeck cowers, wrings his hands and agonizes with incredible fervency, there is little opportunity to foster an emotional connection. Sharon Scruggs plays an impassioned and torn wife to Woyzeck, yet her languishing is overshadowed by the distracting fuschia and turquoise flood lights or the constant background music.

Other players serve more as bizarre scenery than as other personalities: a half-man, half-creature in a tavern, and a comrade of Woyzeck who ultimately serves as a straight man for comedic tangents in the performance. Finally, the Captain (Charles Levin), more obnoxious than oppressive, has too few lines and too little opportunity for expression to develop the force of his character.

Despite these problems, much of Woyzeck is striking and visually transfixing. A scene at the circus has a Barker (D'metruius Conley-Williams) preaching of double-natures, un-idealized reason and the sand dust and slime of man. A drunkard's monologue of earthly evil and the futile existence of man blends the tragic and the absurd. A dance-hall dream of Marie and a Drum Major, complete with droning music, torments Woyzeck and his remembrances of "on and on."

Furthermore, individual scenes in Woyzeck are able to stand alone as poignant and stark meditations. At one point, a white tiled box rises up from the stage to serve as an examination room for Woyzeck's tormenting doctor scientist. This room, which later serves as a gas-chamber for the doomed orderly, stands out in the production. The revolutionary doctor (Will LeBow) delights and disturbs in his twisted dealings with his misbehaving subject Woyzeck.

More confused than challenging, the ART's production evokes a vision of Woyzeck's town that is at some times starkly realistic and at others ephemeral or dreamlike. As the play draws to a climax, the dissonant sounds and effects only increase with the fervency of the mood. At one point, the soldier, his sanity deteriorating, marches off-stage to the musical theme of Twentieth Century Fox. Sadly, this exit seems altogether too appropriate for the tone of the performance.