The Acton Off-Broadway Theatre Review: Woyzeck at Modern Sweater

By Acton

Our imaginations are colluding with the creators of Woyzeck (writer Georg Büchner, director Seth Bockley) from the start, soon after we see a man and woman disfellowshipped from the church and cast out of their community. Marie (Madeline Bernhard) drops to the ground, heaving and convulsing until she gives birth—to an accordion. It’s a tense and absurd moment, but once we see the accordion cradled in Marie’s arms, silently breathing, from then on, it’s a baby. It’s a seductive introduction to the ’90s rock speedball of blood, sugar, sex, and magik, now playing out of a former sweater factory in Ridgewood.

Woyzeck has been censored, dissected, and reinterpreted ever since fragments were found in Georg Büchner’s desk after his death, faintly written in tiny script. Adult Film’s production (from a new translation by John Christopher Jones) shuffles those fragments and deals out a new hand, pairing the detachment and unrest of 1830s Young Germany with that of 1990s grunge (music arranged by Stephee Bonifacio), particularly female artists like PJ Harvey and Courtney Love, performed in low-key character by Bonifacio and AJ Molder.

Based on a sensational real-life crime, we follow the soldier Woyzeck (Ryan Czerwonko), a jarhead who’s been chipped and cracked by what should be pillars of stability in his life: the mother of his child has the hots for another man, his Captain (Randall Jaynes) wants to shtup him, and his Doctor (Megan Metrikin) prescribes an all-pea diet and demands a constant stream of urine samples. Fittingly, Czerwonko uses his body like a machine, slowly accumulating pressure until his bewilderment and anger reach a horrific release. His declarative line delivery sounds like someone trying to be understood through a disorienting fog. Playing a character defined mostly as a reliable source of piss, Czerwonko lets the actual snot get beaten out of him in a performance that’s almost literally balls-out.

As Marie, Madeline Bernhard gives an engrossing depiction of the inner life of a woman dealing with complicated feelings of detachment and longing, particularly for Taylor Petracek’s stone-cold sexy Drum Major, who wears his drum at his crotch and makes it purr like a cat in heat. Randall Jaynes is wonderfully lascivious and weird as Woyzeck’s strip-teasing Captain, and Trevor Clarkson is great as the doleful, hand-sucking Idiot who witnesses everything and shares a pivotal moment of communion with Marie late in the play.

Woyzeck’s set and technical aspects (production design Josh Barilla, lighting design Nick Cozzo) are surprisingly versatile and fundamental to the fun of the show, continuously evolving to engage our imaginations with new locations and moods, from a slightly menacing traveling carnival to a deepening riverbed in the dead of night. True to the Adult Film sensibility, Woyzeck expands the theater experience by freely borrowing techniques from film. What does that mean exactly? You know it when you see it—like when the Doctor (Metrikin) emerges from the shadows, approaches front-row center and switches on a fluorescent light, creating a sharply focused, color-corrected movie close-up.

Director Seth Bockley succeeds in weaving live music, varied acting styles, and inspired visual metaphors into the freshest 200-year-old show in town. Near the end of Woyzeck, flashlight beams search a forest floor for forensic evidence of a crime, and the stained, littered stage floor looks both like the scene of a murder and the remains of the house party we danced at minutes before. It’s one of many theatrical inventions and revelations, delivered up to the last moment of this creative jolt of a show.