Live from the week 2 pickup rehearsal PLUS! We've got Twitter now!

First things first: We've got a Twitter account now, so if you'd like to get a special message from midway through the show (or any other time when you least expect it), just become one of our first followers and we'll tweet you right.

Now, then, bearing in mind John's apology for not including more Woyzeck images in his ever-more-ravishing slideshow, here's a shot (taken about two minutes ago) of the soldier and his captain from a perspective absolutely no one can see during the play proper:



I think it's safe to say that we all feel like the first week of the show was about a month ago, so it's nice to be reuniting for our weekly pickup rehearsal just to make sure we're all remembering who does what and what happens when. On the other hand, it's oddly regressive to be back in an empty room again, sans audience. If you haven't seen the show yet--or even if you've only seen half of it--we looking forward to seeing you in the next 2 weeks!

Hey! You got chocolate on my peanut butter!

I can't tell you what an odd feeling it is, performing in a play which is really two plays at once: two very different plays with separate casts, distinct performance styles, and wildly different tones. (All of this is by design, mind you, but theory and practice are not always the same.) It may actually be less odd for me than for my fellow cast members, since my character (who was actually lifted from one play and inserted in the other) is the only one empowered to cross over from one set to the other at will, but even in my case it feels like we Dream Cabbers are doing one show while Joe and Kate just happen to be in another one in another theater next door. Sometimes when rehearsal is over I ask them, "So how did your play go tonight?" (Granted, the feeling is heightened by the fact that some of us in the Cabaret have been collaborating for about 5 years now, while we're just meeting Kate and Joe for the first time.)

Even so, it never ceases to surprise me how smoothly--to me, at least--the two plays work together in spite of/because of their differences, to the point that I think I would feel cheated now if I saw a production of one without the other.

Early in the rehearsal process, when we Ubu-ites started getting used to playing to a camera, I grasped the irony in the situation: "our" play allegedly celebrates/bemoans anarchy and freedom, yet our actual blocking has to be meticulously worked out so it reads onscreen. "Their" play depicts a man with no freedom, yet Joe and Kate have a vastly larger playing space to work with. We measure our movements in term of inches, while they have feet or yards in which to feel ... trapped.

Thoughts after watching Herzog's Woyzeck

Several of us, mostly from the Ubu cast, watched Werner Herzog's 1979 adaptation of Woyzeck the other day. I'd seen it around the time it came out, but remembered almost nothing about it (other than being disappointed by comparison to Herzog's earlier movies). This second viewing, informed by reading Büchner's script and living with our evolving version of it for a couple of years, made a lot more sense to me. Here's a bit of what went through my mind, and I hope others will join in.

1. For the first time, i really grasped the implications of Sarah's point about the fragmentary/unfinished nature of the original. There's no definitive version of the play, and different translators/directors have fiddled around with it in all sorts of ways. (In some of our earliest discussions of what we might do with it, we briefly toyed with the idea of drawing scenes out of a hat and performing them in totally random order.) Sure enough, Herzog's adaptation includes almost everything ours does, only in a markedly different sequence, plus an additional scene at the end. The effect reminded me of the time I provided text material for a dance piece by three friends--I gave them lots of fragments and told them to take what they wanted and then do anything with it they wanted. When I saw the actual performance, i recognized almost all the words coming out of their mouths, but had no idea what they'd say next or how it would sound. Likewise, everything Woyzeck and company did and said was familiar, yet not.

2. The downside of this arbitrariness is that there's no real character development in the story. Woyzeck (the character) starts off pretty crazy, stays that way as he undergoes various trials and tribulations, and just gets a little crazier at the end. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like there's no single incident that pushes him over the edge--he's already over it from the get-go. I think that has a lot to do with why I didn't remember much about the movie, and why the printed script of the play (minus our, or anyone else's, staging of it) feels a little slight to me.

3. I get the sensation, particularly watching Herzog's filmed version, that the play is from a totally different era and culture than ours. Well, that's obvious, of course, but what I mean is that few of the conventions we as audience members 150 years later take for granted--Method acting, narrative arc, even cause and effect--apply here, at least not in recognizable form.

This is not to suggest I don't find Woyzeck interesting--far from it! In fact, I'm eager to see what other adapters have done with Büchner's raw material, including Berg's opera and the several other film versions.

Here's the trailer for the Herzog movie: