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.