A really good film can captivate in a way that what viewers are watching becomes surreal. The images they see don’t seem to fit into how they are viewing them, and it seems like they’ve actually stepped onto the movie set as one of the characters. It’s even more rare that works of theater are able to produce this effect – to break down the wall between actors and audience and truly get into the viewer’s head.
The Theatre of the New South and Dissonant Theatre Project’s production of “Woyzeck” is one of these that will really “get to you.” Not only is the content something that many have never seen or experienced, but also the ideas behind “Woyzeck” are multi-faceted and make it slippery to comprehend what exactly you are supposed to feel or think about them. Georg Büchner started writing Woyzeck in 1836, but the work was left unfinished due to Büchner’s untimely death at the age of 23. Many authors and playwrights have projected their own endings on the show, drawing from the side notes found in Büchner’s journal. It was first performed in Munich in 1913 and has since become one of the most popular shows in the German repertoire, considered to be the predecessor of the Expressionism movement in theatre.
The production at the UTC Studio Theater took this mysterious foundation and added another twist. On the program, the question was posed to the audience: “Can theatre exist in both a physical and virtual space?” In this vein, audience members entered the theater with the agreement to take part in a social media experiment. They were asked to deliberately break a theatre faux pas and keep cell phones on throughout the performance. Viewers were allowed to: text, live tweet, take pictures/video, and update Facebook.
This was encouraged be-cause Woyzeck itself addresses the theme of comfort, and how comfortable we are seeing things we do not normally see, how comfortable we are talking about them or even sharing them with the whole world via the Internet.
The vision for the piece was anticipated to be “a comment on the modern media’s dehumanizing portrayals of queer figures through a wild live performance. Fusing this classic tragedy with stimulating staging, original music…we will be pushing the boundaries of the Chattanooga stage.” This interpretation of a classic play did not fail to impress and leave audience members like myself, thinking about what they saw long after the lights had gone down. The setting of the stage was a simplistic white-floored room, covered with television sets and surrounded by chairs rising in bleacher fashion.
As the show began, we met Woyzeck, played by Kaleb Moran, who seems to be an all-American soldier boy, albeit with the voices of newscasters who ring in his head and a jarring sense of paranoia that follows him. We learn that Woyzeck and Marie played by Madeleine Young have just had a child out of wedlock, and are a poor and confused pair.
In the 90-minute production, things change quickly, and we find that the child out of wedlock is not the problem, but rather something strangely related to the experiments Woyzeck is under from an over-the-top but very funny doctor (Andy Pyburn) and the stress placed on Woyzeck from his superior officer with a strange grasp on virtue (Emanuel Clark).
The performance of Pyburn was one of my favorites as this medical professional offers questionable recommendations from a diet for Woyzeck of nothing but peas, to repeated calls for regulated urine samples, and other orders that seem to lead to Woyzeck’s trip over the edge. This cheerful doctor only truly finds tragedy when Woyzeck elects to commit suicide instead of becoming a specimen in an asylum. In this interpretation by director Blake Harris, televisions and media soon come to be recognized as predatory elements. When Marie’s sexual preferences and behavior begin to tilt from what is regarded as “normal,” Woyzeck takes measures to end them and Marie with a stab of a knife, portrayed as a television remote. Shortly thereafter, he drags Marie and himself to drown in the waters of anti-gay media coverage.
There is also a great scene where Marie is caught between the clean and safe world of button down and tie wearing Woyzeck or her preferred sexuality of violence and confusion. She is pulled down by elements of her sexual preference, before Woyzeck steps up to do her in with the remote. Another great performance came from the Captain, who reiterates his virtue and values while on the back of a bound and gagged man.
Other stellar performances are made by other players in the cast including Matthew Erwin as Andres, Kristina Lumm as Margaret, Jennifer Ervin as the drum-major, Michael Rudez and Jessie Wright as newscasters, and Tarik Issa as the grandmother. Without question, these players put on a performance with Broadway, worthy material that kept audience members fully engaged long after the final, chair gripping scene.
For more information on the Dissonant Theatre Project or Theater for the New South, visit their Facebook pages.