Researching for a play like Woyzeck is about at arduous as trying to make the plot 100% linear. Upon the playwright’s death, the scripts’ scenes were left unassembled and, some argue, missing the rumored ending with Woyzeck being on trial. As a whole, the play is considered an “unstable” text which poses many problems concerning author’s intent, story line and etc. There is also no mention of a specific town, state, or country for the setting or even a specific time period. In fact, Prussia (where Buchner was from) was split up into a bunch of little kingdoms, independent cities, towns and et cetera that made the whole country very discombobulated. However, there are clues to many textual problems that can be answered by the ideas the play presents.
We know Georg Buchner began writing the play around 1836 and remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1837. In Prussia, around this time, was going through a period that came to be known as the German Romanticism which presented ideas Buchner tossed aside. In fact, critics say that Woyzeck is a critique of the social system that was in place at that time. Buchner, and a number of other rebels, sought to depict the world realistically and filled with hopelessness, monotony, and suffering which came to be known as Bourgeois Realism. In this point in history, poverty ran amok, cholera spread like wildfire and where butcher's meat was a luxury. The average life expectancy was low and child mortality was very high. The three main antagonist in Woyzeck are from a higher social class and openly express and exert their view of the world in this light upon our protagonist which helps lead him to his demise.
Even though all this information is helpful to get into the right frame of mind for the characters in Woyzeck, the play structurally still poses to be a problem. Should the text be approached as a fragmented piece or should there be an attempt to piece it together to make a comprehensible story? Many productions approached the text “as is” but added little nuances that assisted in telling the overall story. The Rough Magic SEEDS ran away with the "theatricality is key" idea by presenting the show in a cabaret style. The Clarence Brown Theatre took a different approach by presenting the work with all the familiarities of a normal play but used minimal props accompanied by artistically simple lighting. In 2006, the California Institute of the Arts approached Woyzeck as a work of art (as it is such) and literally presented it that way. They performed the show in a form of gallery setting where the audience followed a green line on the floor that led them around the space as scenes were happening. The show was performed in a 40 minute loop repeating three times and the audience could stay as long as they liked. However, The Brooklyn Academy of Music took the play Woyzeck to a whole new world, in 2008, by writing music for the show, giving new jobs to the characters and occasionally would throw in some lines from Buchner’s script. They also grasped the extreme theatricality idea that worked with the other productions but Charles Isherwood felt that they went too far. He felt that the artistic team strayed too far from the text and almost wasn’t the same story. Overall, past productions of Woyzeck that seemed to get the most positive reviews had just the right amount of theatricality and knew when to pull back.
If our artistic team were to approach this as a theatrical piece as opposed to a more realistic play, then casting Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck Non-Traditionally will add to the beauty of the work. There is no indication in the script to necessary physicality of the characters except that Marie should be attractive in order for the Drum-Major to have motivation to pursue her and the child is…well…a child. If the play were to be presented as a realistic interpretation instead of having that circus feel, then many Traditional casting considerations would arise. Eventhough, some of the roles in Woyzeck, like the apprentices', children, and students, lack a specific sex in their character descriptions, there are certain ones who MUST be their perspective male/female roles. Not only is it against copyright law to cast characters opposite to their gender specific roles, the 1800's is an unforgiving time period in which you could not publicly have homosexual relationships, therefore, Woyzeck and Marie or the Drum-Major and Marie could not be the same sex. Casting the play Non-Traditionally would give the production team more artistic liberties than the latter.
As the play is textually unstable, anyone who attempts to produce the play will have to overcome some obstacles. Different productions have tackled these hurdles differently but the ones who were the most successful at it, didn't make the work Woyzeck into something that it wasn't. My advice would be to present Woyzeck artistically but still
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