SONG
LOGIC
By Jonathan Kalb
Woyzeck
By Georg Büchner
Brooklyn Academy of Music
"Doctor, have you ever seen anything
of double nature?" asks the title character in Georg Büchner's
Woyzeck. In most productions this line isn't taken literally.
It's handled as just one among dozens of philosophical abstractions
that continually drop from Woyzeck's mouth like half-chewed seeds.
Not so in the musical version of Woyzeck that Robert
Wilson created with Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan--a production
of the Betty Nansen Theater in Copenhagen, originally from 2000,
that ran at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2002. Here
the doctor is played by two actors in identical purplish black
suits who hop around the stage in lockstep as a pair of rather
obnoxious and abrasive Siamese twins. Asked in an interview for
his reasoning on this unusual choice, Wilson said: "You want
to know the truth? I liked both of the actors very much and they
were very different, so I thought, why not have them be Siamese
twins?"
Deliberative text interpretation has never been the prime attraction
of Wilson's "theater of images." Famously mistrustful
of words and what he sees as their overweening influence on theater
art, he has frequently demoted them to verbal wallpaper. Nevertheless,
he himself has exhibited something of a "double nature"
with respect to literature over the years, directing canonical
masterpieces almost as often as his preferred nonsense texts and
assemblages of literary fragments. When he chooses his collaborators
astutely, the masterpieces can be among his most powerful productions--When
We Dead Awaken, Parsifal, and The Lady from the Sea,
for instance.
With Woyzeck--modern drama's most venerable fragment,
the long lost 1837 work about a tormented quintessential nobody
who murders his wife after she betrays him--it's hard to think
of a more ideal collaborator than Tom Waits. Büchner's play
is blunt and lyrical by turns, spinning out its infernal carnival
of a tale in short, Shakespearean scenes almost all of which are
punctuated with music: period folk songs, ditties, taproom lieder,
children's counting rhymes and more, which lighten the gloomy
atmosphere. Waits reinvented and augmented this interaction of
music and words without straying from his persona as pop music's
favorite carny barker. What better complement to Büchner
than Waits's ironic sentimentality, his jagged Weillesque rhythms,
sweetly gloomy lyrics, and gift for making sleazy circumstances
rise above cliché? (Waits had only a passing knowledge
of Alban Berg's 1925 opera Wozzeck before this project,
and no great admiration for it--"It was pretty morose and
turgid.")
Call it a convenient marriage of opposites--in theory at least.
Waits and Brennan got their fingers dirty and Wilson stayed managerially
clean. The songwriters immersed themselves in Woyzeck's
sordid world, with its chillingly realistic torments mixed with
bursts of bizarre imagery, morbidly weird anecdotes, and ruminations
on madness and superstition. The director stuck to his unflappable
cool, his geometric designs, his antiseptically generalized modernism,
insisting to all the interviewers who managed to pin him down
that the play was nothing more than a simple love story. Fire
and ice, substance and style, the maternal and the paternal.
The gains are many and significant. At two hours and ten minutes,
Woyzeck is shorter, punchier, and sexier than many other
Wilson productions. It's also lighter and more capricious than
any other Woyzeck or Wozzeck I've seen. The
lightness resides mainly in the characters' movements--Woyzeck,
played by the Gumby-jointed Jens Jørn Spottag, runs in
place like a computer-animated marathon man, for instance, and
his identically dressed little boy dances guilelessly and dashes
mischievously about. In his Village Voice review, Marc
Robinson eloquently described this movement as a product of "immature
energy that mocks despair." The show has a deliberate pace
and a forward propulsion rare in Wilson's work, and also a morbid
humor that is easy, fluid, and organic--an effect not of interpolated
"knee plays" or other extraneous vignettes but rather
of shrewd integration of Waits's and Brennan's droll and harshly
seductive songs (which they recorded on their album "Blood
Money").
During the opening number called "Misery is the River
of the World," for instance, a brash, stomping carnival
dirge, the entire cast assembles and sings in front of one of
Wilson's huge, cartoonish Ab-Ex backdrops, and then everyone files
out except for a mechanical monkey. Alone in a spotlight, the
monkey continues the song in the inimitable, tractor-on-gravel
voice of Waits (on tape): "The higher that the monkey can
climb/ The more he shows his tail." Later, Woyzeck's friend
Andres sings a boozy, shanty-like number called "It's Just
the Way We Are Boys," to keep Woyzeck from brooding on the
infidelity of his wife Marie. The song degenerates into obscene
limericks, at one point stopping abruptly for the actor to recite
one without music and get a big laugh. ("There once was a
man from Kent/Whose dick was so long it was bent/So to save him
the trouble/He put it in double/And instead of coming he went"--in
Brooklyn, the Danish actors spoke and sang lucid English; in Europe
the play was in Danish with the songs in English.)
There is another side to this Woyzeck, however, acutely
unsatisfying to those who know and value the material. Ultimately,
one sees that Wilson has not really left interpretation to others
but deliberately simplified the work so that its intricacies wouldn't
complicate his schematic plans. In the shaving scene, for instance,
the Captain's marvelous, belligerently desperate lines about time
and morality ("I can't look at a mill wheel anymore or I
get melancholy") are blotted out with grating and deafening
orchestral noise, which halts only for Woyzeck's monosyllabic
responses ("Yes, Cap'n . . . Yes, Cap'n"). Similarly,
the twin doctors are barely coherent, preoccupied as they are
with vocal games such as alternating words between them and using
sing-songy, whiney intonations. Wilson clearly has no interest
in what either character has to say. Nor is he particularly interested
in the nuances of the love affair he says is the main attraction:
Marie (Kaya Brüel) and the Drum Major (Tom Jensen) are costumed
in matching bright red but otherwise generate little heat together.
The truth is, Wilson's real priority, as always, is design--the
angular, color-coded costumes and the slow-moving tableaus backed
by changing color-washes and simply drawn, decoratively Euclidean
backdrops, all of which are looking extremely similar from show
to show these days. Berg's opera, as it happens, is also famous
for focusing its action more on the tale of romantic betrayal
than Büchner did, but its close commingling of music and
language gives it a strong coherence, depth, and integrity of
its own. Wilson's Woyzeck (which uses the same scene
order as Berg's Wozzeck until the final three scenes)
relies literally on bells and whistles (and songs). It has nothing
like the same sense of elemental integration, partly because of
Wilson's determined naiveté (which always supports a strict
parallelism of elements, not a true integration) but also partly
because of what Waits described (in a May 2002 interview with
The Onion) as "song logic."
The fact that Blood Money is
about Woyzeck . . . I didn't know anything about Woyzeck.
Kathleen knew more than I, but I didn't really know the story
or anything. I was just told the story in a coffee shop in Boston
over eggs a few years ago. You try to create some sort of counterpoint
for this story, but you're still dealing with song logic. When
people listen to songs, they're not . . . It's like a form of
hypnotism that goes on during the listening process, so you're
taking it up through a straw. It's like a separate little world
in the world. You go in there and then you pop back out.
Here's the nub of the marriage of convenience
in this production. Waits and Brennan saw more than Wilson did
in Woyzeck, but they cared as much about making a good
pop album as about making a good musical. Wilson trusted them
to carry most of the burden of sophistication in the show because
the prospect of his collaborators presiding over "separate
little worlds" has never bothered him. (The raunchy number
"Everything Goes to Hell," for instance, carries
the production's most incisive statement about lying, and the
oft-reprised ballads "Coney Island Baby" and
"All the World is Green" build and maintain
the whole emotional edifice about love that the plot knocks down.)
It's the old John Cage/Merce Cunningham gambit of parallel creation,
inviting startling fortuitous conjunctions, only here the gambit
becomes an alibi for half-baked dramaturgy. No one involved conveyed
genuine passion for the work itself in the end--certainly not
the kind of passion that sparks empathy with murder. Woyzeck
thus became essentially an amusement, yet another case of entertainment
trumping art, graphic design trumping language, and the synoptic
pop song setting the terms and limits of the culture's poetic
aspiration.
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