WOYZECK
This kind of emblematic staging runs throughout director Warren Leming’s Woyzeck, which begins with a procession in silhouette led by a sword-wielding figure. Both the characters of Woyzeck (Charles Richards) and his wife Marie (Melissa Landis) appear at times with shadowy doubles (Jim Blanchette and Melissa Schubeck) who duplicate their gestures behind them. Employing a variety of Kabuki-like conventions, from black-hooded figures to percussive accompaniments to exaggerated vocal inflections, Leming has attempted to distill Georg Buchner’s unfinished masterpiece into a kind of mythic essence.
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Curiously, Leming isolates his actors in almost every scene. In Buchner’s opening scene Woyzeck is sitting with a fellow soldier discussing his paranoid delusions about a Freemason conspiracy against him. This soldier’s empathetic responses to Woyzeck’s ravings seem intended to invite the audience to feel for this horribly tormented man. But in Leming’s production Woyzeck stands alone onstage, ranting and laughing diabolically.
