Show Response: Woyzeck
by Aaron Tomey
Adult Film’s production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck brings to life the climate catastrophes, paranoia, and sexual dysfunction that plague us today. It was terribly hot in the show’s venue, Ridgewood’s Modern Sweater, and the free water and fans were only palliative. There is no cure. This is how the world will end, right outside our door.
Woyzeck (Ryan Czerwonko) reports what cannot be staged: a sky cracked open, a sky on fire, the length of eternity, something moving behind infinite darkness. Being watched and being spoken to by the unseen. Flock cameras, gang stalking: his hallucinations reflect the surveillance we’ve come to collectively accept. He has visions of climate annihilation: NYC is subtropical now, and the show’s opening week alternated between Canadian wildfire smoke and flash flooding.
He is a madman, soldier, new father of an out-of-wedlock child (played by an accordion), and cuckold: he does it all. We are stretched horribly thin, forced to do so many things at once, and, like Woyzeck, we’re mostly bad at them but get no slack for barely treading water. We, like him, have to report to authority figures we do not respect but who regardless hold great power over us. Instead of the Captain (Randall Jaynes) who chides him as sinful, or the Doctor (Megan Metrikin) who prods him and collects his piss, we face middle-managers listing our deficiencies to Claude and Clippy. Higher up, we imagine ourselves resisting a government that is either the malicious abetted by the incompetent, or a cabalic structure, but either way we feel like we’re looking at it the wrong way.
The Drum-Major (Taylor Petracek) steals Woyzeck’s lover Marie (Madeline Bernhard), and emasculates him twofold by beating him. The cuck and the bull: sex is no longer spoken of with any romance. Woyzeck never appears devoted as a father or partner, and the Drum-Major is only driven by lust. We crack and stretch each other out. We can’t even exchange names on Feeld. He kills Marie, drags her corpse outside into Ridgewood. Love and military work gave him nothing. Woyzeck extricates himself from society by violence, and for that he receives no reward: there is no cure for him.
The play subverts any attempt at relief. Scenes at the local carnival and party play out like dive bar nights or k-hole club escapes: no catharsis, only an abatement. Adult Film’s production of John Christopher Jones’ translation is urgent and brutal. During a DIY cover of Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll,” Woyzeck stalked through the attendees, grabbing the shirt of a man sitting beside me, close enough for me to smell the reek of layered sweat on him. And then he was gone, through a door and back onto the stage, and that’s how it’ll end for all of us: too scared to keep up with what’s happening, Metrikin’s Doctor cowering on a ladder, Jaynes’ Captain dozing off in the corner, no help before or after it’s over.
Adult Film’s production of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck opened July 17 and will run through August 15.
Aaron Tomey co-edits North Brooklyn news site Grime Square. His essays have previously appeared in Hobart and Bushwick Burner Phone. He can be found on Twitter @ecstatic_donut.