staging the imagined truth with speed & violence
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Woyzeck
by georg büchner
"Director Bob McDonald places the action in a nebulous world of contemporary Western politics and military confusion. Despite his rapid pacing, he mines every powerful emotion and moments of ugliness and cruelty in stark detail."
LA WEEKLY GO!
PICK OF THE WEEK
Tom Provenzano
Nov. 26, 2008
"Jacque Lynn Colton's basso-voiced top-of-the-show anti-fairy tale monologue about a child searching the world and the heavens for ethical evenhandedness in his impoverished existence is particularly disquieting, immediately encapsulating Büchner's fatalistic view of what he obviously saw as the inescapable destiny of mankind."
BACKSTAGE WEST
Travis Michael Holder
Nov. 26, 2008
"The production has a shadowy, Caligariesque minimalism perfect for showcasing Büchner's storytelling without the theatrical excess common to this play. Nowhere is this asceticism more evident than in the jarring performance in the title role by Christian Levatino, who creates an indelibly idiosyncratic portrait of a once-proud man stripped of his humanity by fat cats who see him as so bereft of morality he has become bowed by their avarice. "People like me, we don't have virtue," the shamed Woyzeck has been taught by his oppressors. "We only have what's natural."
There is an exaggeratedly stylized component to Levatino's body language reminiscent of silent-screen protagonists with a touch of Dracula's pal Renfield thrown in, a tensely spread-fingered stalking quirkiness that works to the production's great advantage."