A Modern Voice for 1837’s ‘Woyzeck’

Traipsing through a stage area strewn with sheet metal, nails, buzz saws and 2-by-4s, director Brian Kulick looks back at his visitor and says, “This place is chaos. It can be pretty dangerous.”

Actually, this is a good shorthand description of Georg Buchner’s revolutionary 1837 tragedy, “Woyzeck.” But Kulick might also be talking about his own imposing task staging one of theater’s supreme challenges, a 155-year-old play that remains daringly experimental.

“It’s not necessarily my guiding principle,” he says, with a smile curving around his boyish face, “but I do think that it’s good to put yourself in scary situations.”

At least Kulick and his longtime collaborator, designer Mark Wendland, have put themselves in a cramped situation at Hollywood’s tiny 2nd Stage, where “Woyzeck” opened Friday. And just to make things more interesting, Kulick is entering in on turf controlled by the Actors’ Gang. He is one of the rare guest directors to helm a production by the ensemble, in residence at 2nd Stage during 1992.

That isn’t all. Rather than be “saddled” with an existing English translation of an uncompleted play that has long been a favorite hobbyhorse of scholars, Kulick turned to Adrian Georga, a friend from his undergraduate days at UCLA, to provide a fresh translation. He then asked playwright Han Ong to fashion a faithful but modern adaptation. Kulick directed Ong’s “Reasons to Live. Half. No Reason” at the Mark Taper Forum’s New Works festival and at San Francisco’s Magic Theatre.

“It’s said that perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to English-speaking theater is that Shakespeare wrote in English,” Kulick notes. “We are always stuck with the original, while the Swedes or Indians get a brand-new ‘Hamlet’ every 10 years or so. Hopefully, this will be our new ‘Woyzeck.’ ”

Still, what is Kulick doing in such a small theater just as he and Wendland appear to be moving toward bigger productions? After all, their next project is “Carmen,” to open the Long Beach Opera’s season in November--their third production with LBO following Debussy’s “Peleas and Melisande” and Stravinsky’s “L’Histoire du Soldat.”

“I enjoy moving back and forth, in and out of different situations,” which is why, the 30-year-old Kulick says, he has resisted settling down as a theater’s resident director. (He did stay at the Taper long enough during the mid-’80s to direct Pierre Marivaux’s “The Game of Love and Chance” and Pierre Corneille’s “L’Illusion Comique” at Taper, Too.) “But Mark and I have found that we can apply lessons learned in opera to the theater, and vice versa.”

He then supplies evidence, thumbing through a book of set sketches he and Wendland devised for “Woyzeck.” “We free-associate ideas, and came up with one about a wall--the wall of alienation between Woyzeck the soldier and the rest of society; his wife, Marie; the authority figures around him, and, most of all, himself. Then the wall changes from section to section, until it becomes the lid that stops the world from boiling over.”

Kulick provided Ong with the sketches, which, Ong says, “were a piece with the kind of cold, metallic worlds I tend to create in my original plays--not sets really, but spaces in which things enter and are transformed.”

For so many key non-Actors’ Gang artists to have taken charge of an Actors’ Gang production must have created some furor, but, according to Kulick, it all happened casually. “They were putting together their year’s season, and Brent Hinkley (who plays Woyzeck) told Mark that the Gang was accepting ideas for shows. I went to their meeting and suggested ‘Woyzeck.’ It would be a perfect fit for their expressive acting style, and a continuation of their work in avant-garde European theater. (Gang artistic director) Tim Robbins was sitting in the back of the theater and asked me, ‘Does that mean you want to direct it?’

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure at first. I just wanted to throw out the idea, because I’m probably the Gang’s oldest fan. I took a lot of theater classes at UCLA with Tim, and was always checking out what they were coming up with. We both swore that we would never do a play set in a living room.”

Why didn’t Kulick simply join the Gang at UCLA? “See, even as early as 1980-81, Tim already had an incredibly developed aesthetic, which is very rare for undergrads. I wasn’t at all sure what I wanted, and felt that I needed to find out on my own.”

In the process, Kulick has become one of his peers’ more serious investigators of the classical repertoire. Ong says he wasn’t surprised that Kulick wanted to stage “Woyzeck:” “A key part of Brian’s sensibility is to filter a classical work through a young, modern voice, which is what he did with Tony Kushner and his adaptation of ‘The Illusion.’ We didn’t have a fundamental argument with Buchner’s conception, but agreed that it was important to make the language as much my own as possible.”