A “reimagionation,” set in wartime Iraq, based on the play WOYZECK by Georg Büchner

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FORWARD

Georg Büchner’s WOYZECK, the first modern tragedy and the major forerunner of modernist avant-garde plays, is not the easiest play to love. It is blunt, nihilist, misogynistic; its characters are two-dimensional; scenes are fragmented and self-contained, and none flows out of or into any of the others; and yet one cannot deny its relevance or its cumulative power.

Büchner died at age 23 in 1837 of typhus. He left behind three plays -- DANTON’S DEATH (considered, by some, to be the finest first play ever written), LEONCE AND LENA, and the unfinished WOYZECK. According to a letter Büchner wrote to his fiancée, he was within one week of completing the play before he died. His handwriting was often difficult to decipher and the scenes were short and fragmented, left in no sequential order. The play was not published until 42 years after his death, and its first performance, in Munich, was not until 1913.

WOYZECK NOW, based, in part, on 10 different translations or adaptations , including Alban Berg’s libretto for his opera WOYZZECK, is a grotesquely comic, sexually explicit, post-modern “reinvention” of the original play, set during the American military occupation in Iraq, in 2006 -- that bloody, unnecessary war at its most unpredictably violent. Liberties were taken, scenes were shuffled or combined , characters were dropped, names were changed, but I stayed true to the spirit of the original, not only to its overall aesthetic but to the “beats” of each brief scene.

- Brian Richard Mori (2020)