|
In his red swallowtail coat, a carnival barker bows to the audience, grins, then flicks on a light that transforms his smile to a Death's Head leer: "Ladies and Gentlemen! You are all going to die!" So begins the first of the New World Performance Laboratory's many feats of theatrical sleight-of-hand in its dazzling adaptation of "Woyzeck", running through May 9th at Cleveland Public Theatre. It's horrific, intense, grueling, and challenging -- so what makes the infernal thing so damnably enjoyable to watch?
For those who have never seen the experimental ensemble, this reprise of "Woyzeck" is an excellent introduction to the paradoxical pleasures of its company. Featuring four actors of astonishing physicality, precision, and presence, haunting a cappella singing, and director James Slowiak's vivid imagistic staging, the Northeast Ohio-based NWPL continues to be one of the U.S.'s most intriguing theatre companies -- and "Woyzeck" is arguably the strongest piece in its repertory.
Georg Buchner's modernist classic was left in fragments at his death in 1837, but what remains has the punk-nihilistic sensibility of its 23-year-old author. A tale of a working-class enlisted man, Woyzeck (a riveting Jairo Cuesta, popeyed and slackjawed), who is driven to madness and murder by the scientific experiments he undergoes to get money for his common-law wife Marie (Debora Totti) and baby, it's partly a tragic exploration of a natural man destroyed by the betrayals of "civilized" middle-class capitalist society.
In the Performance Lab's version, it becomes "a Morality Play performed by the Prodigies of Dr. Somnus' Freak Show", a carnivalesque venture that illustrates the skull beneath the skin even as it capers at giddy top speed. All of Woyzeck's tormentors -- his pompous military boss, a cuckolding colleague, the scientist who forces him to eat nothing but cold canned peas for months -- are collapsed into a sinister Master of Ceremonies, The Charlatan, played with a vivisectionist glee by the amazing Terence Cranendonk. A formidable physical comedian, Cranendonk is paired with an equally remarkable performer: the rubber-faced Salvatore Motta, who plays both his idiot carnival geek and Woyzeck's friend Andres. To watch Motta transform, in sequence, into a whole panoply of sideshow freaks or trot around on hooves made of tin cans as the "astronomical" counting horse is a dizzying pleasure.
Between them, Cuesta's anguished black-comic intensity, and Totti's deadpan Italian female pragmatism, they elevate moment after moment into a sublime, bleak metaphysical vaudeville: think of a Platonic version of "Waiting for Godot" by top clowns, accompanied by Gnostic hymn tunes in 4-part harmony. It's eerie and unforgettable, the kind of experience that can make your neck crawl with horror while you laugh aloud at the sheer perverse delight of the performances.
Occasionally the performers' accents get thick enough to make the text a challenge to follow, but even that creates interesting resonances: watching the amoral Charlatan (Cranendonk, the only native English speaker) preach about morality to the halting-tongued Woyzeck while he near-hypnotizes him with a coin always out of reach is a devastating colonialist parody.
The intermissionless 90-minute production, spare and precisely beautiful, takes place in Cleveland Public Theatre's 70-seat DownStage space. Douglas Scott-Goheen's effective set is little more than a metallic carnival booth and a few choice props. Costumes by Inda Blatch-Geib and Nancy Pope are colorful and evocative, especially Marie's flouncy pink dress and lime-green stockings.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|