In “Woyzeck,” Buchner forged his true revolution, a new type of drama, which had to wait until 1913 for its first production. The play is based on the true case of a soldier who killed his mistress and was publicly beheaded. This was the first time the insanity plea was used. Buchner makes his Woyzeck’s “insanity” a complex state of mind: degraded by his superiors, subjected to crazy medical experiments by the army doctor (an uncanny foreshadowing of Nazi horrors), sexually betrayed by his common-law wife, Woyzeck kills her in a paroxysm of despair.
Left in a fragmented state at Buchner’s death, “Woyzeck” is a Venus flytrap for eager directors, who have put actors on stilts, used puppets, even staged two different versions on the same night. In 1969 Ingmar Bergman invited audiences to rehearsals to make suggestions. Joanne Akalaitis, the successor to Joseph Papp at New York’s Public Theater, tries to keep the play’s bone-marrow starkness while adding color: music, dance, nudity, a murder in slo-mo. Some of her brushstrokes smudge Buchner’s acid-sharp draftsmanship, but the net effect is powerful and haunting. Jesse Borrego’s spectral Woyzeck is the ultimate victim: shaving his overbearing captain (Zach Grenier), his razor becomes a mini-guillotine,the portent of revolution.
