First Produced. Period, Multiple Settings. Germany, s. Cast Size. Samuel French. Ideal for. Casting Notes. Mostly male cast Includes adult, mature adult, young adult, elderly, late teen characters.
Lead Characters. Franz Woyzeck Woyzeck - Play. Log in to add to your bookmarks! The Captain Woyzeck - Play. The Doctor Woyzeck - Play. View More. Half-Price Tickets. View More Ticket Discounts.
This page is only accessible by StageAgent Pro members. You need a Pro account to access this feature. He points out a line on the grass and tells Andres it is the mark left by an executed prisoner's head when chopped off. Turning it into a sort of ghost story, he adds: "someone picked it up once, thought it was a hedgehog. Three days and three nights, and he was lying in his coffin.
Next he sees apocalyptic visions in the sky, exclaiming: "How bright it is! Flames are raging through the heavens and a distant roar like trumpets. It's getting nearer! Let's get away. Don't look back. Andres admits that he is scared and then hears a real sound: the military drums beating a tattoo in the distance. He tells Woyzeck that they must return to the town.
Marie is holding her child at the window and Margreth is at her respective window when the military tattoo marches by, led by the Drum-Major. Both women remark on how stalwart the Drum-Major is, and he salutes them. Seeing the "friendly sparkle in [Marie's] eye," Margreth teases her neighbor about being attracted to the Drum-Major. She teases Marie about having a child out of wedlock and insinuates that Marie wants to sleep with the Drum-Major, saying, "you can see clean through seven pairs of leather breeches!
Then she comforts her child by saying: "Don't fret, little 'un You're just a poor little tart's kid, and you makes your mum happy with your bastard face," and singing a folk song about having an illegitimate child. Woyzeck knocks at the window, but cannot come in because he must hurry to roll-call. Before leaving, he spouts hallucinatory thoughts to Marie's bewilderment: "Marie, it's happened again, lots of things.
Is it not written: and behold, there rose up smoke from the land like smoke from a furnace? It followed right behind me as far as the town. Where's it going to end? Marie exclaims, to herself and also perhaps to her child, how strange Woyzeck is acting. Specifically she notes: "He'll go beserk with all them thoughts of his. By the end of the scene it has fallen pitch black because the street lamp is not working.
Marie remarks that it "gives [her] the shivers. Marie and Woyzeck are walking around a fair. The scene opens with a poor old man and child singing and dancing for money.
Soon after, they come upon a Showman promoting his spectacle, which is implied to be a dancing monkey. He calls: "Consider the creature as God first made it; nothing, just nothing.
Add civilization and see what you've got: walks upright, wears trousers and carries a cane. The monkey's already a soldier, though that's not saying much-the bottom-most species of human kind! Just then the Sergeant and Drum-Major notice Marie and remark hungrily on her attractiveness. The play comes to us a fragment without a real ending. There is something almost uncanny about the spell it casts over audiences. Extraordinarily short, it vibrates with its compact intensity. A good performance need last no longer than forty minutes, although there are almost thirty scenes.
The new dramatic structure, first attempted in Danton, is here brought to perfection. The division into acts disappears and so does character development.
Plot is kept to a minimum. Just a series of stark pictures, brief confrontations between a humble man and the various people who populate his narrow world. Even more shocking: kindly sympathy for a man who viciously murders a woman right on the stage! And it is not just any murderer, for Woyzeck is not the perverse invention of a writer, but an extraordinarily faithful portrait of one of the most publicized killers of the time. Woyzeck is one of the first plays in Europe about ordinary people.
A lower-class character, formerly marginalized and ignored in previous plays, suitable not for a revealed subjective or moral life but for comic relief, takes center stage for the first time. Woyzeck, however, does not just democratize drama by introducing a radically new dramatic subject.
Concerned with the ways in which individuals are shaped by surroundings and social position, Woyzeck anticipates literary naturalism by almost a half-century. By its treatment of a notorious real-life murder case, Woyzeck is also one of the earliest examples of documentary theater and has been praised as the greatest social drama in German literature. Its open-ended, fragmented structure projecting internal, distorted states of mind anticipates expressionism, while its reduction of experience down to the incongruous and bizarre anticipates the theater of the absurd.
His father was a successful physician, an enthusiast of the French Revolution, and a fervent supporter of the social reforms instituted by Napoleon in Germany. He also collaborated in on the political pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote The Hessian Messenger that promulgated his view that social reform in Germany would only come through the revolutionary awakening of the disenfranchised, oppressed, and impoverished German peasantry aligned with enlightened industrialists, politicians, and intellectuals.
In Strasbourg he would complete a second play, the satirical comedy Leonce und Lena and the psychological novella Lenz. He also finished his research and dissertation on the nervous system of fish and received his doctorate from the University of Zurich, where he was offered a faculty position.
In Leipzig in Woyzeck, a year-old homeless ex-soldier and onetime barber, was apprehended for the stabbing death of a year-old widow, his former mistress, whom Woyzeck killed in a jealous rage.
Confessing fully to the police, Woyzeck was summarily tried and found guilty after evidence of insanity was discounted by the expert testimony of Dr. Johann Clarus, a clinical professor at the medical school of the University of Leipzig. After examining Woyzeck on several occasions, Clarus judged him free of any physical or mental impairment to justify the suspension of his legal responsibilities.
Cutting branches in an open field with his comrade Andres, Woyzeck observes:. You know this place is cursed? Look at that light streak on the grass.
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