STAGE REVIEW : A New ‘Woyzeck’: Feel the Power

We know we can expect good things from the Actors’ Gang, but “Woyzeck,” at Hollywood’s 2nd Stage, may be its best thing yet.

Georg Buchner’s choppy, expressionistic treatise on social oppression, left in pieces at the time of his death yet far ahead of its time, has been adapted by Han Ong and masterminded by director Brian Kulick. Kulick and Ong’s rapid-fire series of anxiety-inducing staccato images slap you in the face and make the drama of this battered foot soldier more modern and immediate than ever.

What Buchner intuited as the collapse of morality in the world is a pervasive 20th-Century reality that makes the message of this 1836 play virtually up to the minute. But Ong’s script and Kulick’s stylized take on it go it one better.

Kulick has orchestrated this hour-and-40-minute nihilistic spectacle as a wind-up ballet where each ghostly gesture is precise, each phrase deliberate and where, in a conceit that (for once) works uncommonly well, lines are addressed directly to the audience rather than to other actors.

The effect is potent but would be incomplete were it not wedded to Mark Wendland’s exceptional scenic design, pierced by Kevin Adams’ deep shadows and hot white lights.

Wendland’s construct of claustrophobic steel panels is fitted with stepladders and seamless doors and windows that subliminally emulate a prison but serve myriad purposes. Halfway through the show, its front wall is hoisted and reversed to become a slope the color of blood, raked at a treacherously steep angle, on which the actors slip, struggle and slide to their inexorable end.

It is a rare kind of physical metaphor that encapsulates in a startling image all that the play is about. That alone would suffice to make this an indelible “Woyzeck.” But Kulick’s concept goes further. Many of his male characters, Woyzeck included, have shaved heads and the pallor of the living dead.

That pallor, the interrogation-room lights, the stern militaristic movement and the pontificating doctor’s preeminence, suggest the climate of an insane asylum--an effect abetted by Nathan Birnbaum’s eerie musical distortions that fill the air like succubi.

To all this, the actors bring major contributions: Ned Bellamy his wild-eyed, arrogant doctor; Lee Arenberg a stuffy, moralistic captain; Jeff Foster the insufferable vanity of his womanizing drum major and Dean Robinson his priest, dripping with piety.

Steven M. Porter offers a classic portrait of a gentle, stammering, sometimes speechless “idiot.” Jack Black as Woyzeck’s barracks mate Andres presents a stolid, impenetrable passivity, in ultimate contrast to Arthur Hanket’s leering carnival barker--the ironic puppet master pulling the strings.

Shannon Holt is the unhappy Marie, holding on to her faceless child by Woyzeck as if weighted by a stone. And Brent Hinkley is the downtrodden Woyzeck on his diet of peas--the invisible man becoming visibly unstable, watching fire ants devour the sky, finally engulfed by his own murderous psychosis.

Ong has heightened Buchner’s pessimism by isolating certain lines almost as pronouncements. This would be folly in a naturalistic production, but given the acutely conceptual nature of this one, which feels like an animated version of Edvard Munch’s “Scream,” they serve to punctuate stylization. They are verbal benchmarks wherein religion, dogma and bigotry take a beating as society spirals darkly down the drain.

Nothing is more animalistic than Woyzeck and friends in hand-to-hand combat, and nothing more stunning than the simultaneity of Marie’s confession to the priest on one side of the stage, while on the other, Woyzeck negotiates to buy the weapon that will kill her.

But it is Buchner’s closing line that delivers the play’s most staggering punch: “The future,” says the doctor, “looks bright.”

“Woyzeck,” 2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, (213) 466-1767. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 2; $10. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Brent Hinkley: Woyzeck

Jack Black: Andres

Ned Bellamy: The Doctor

Shannon Holt: Marie

Steven M. Porter: The Idiot

Jeff Foster: The Drum Major

Dean Robinson: The Priest

Arthur Hanket: The Carnival Barker

Lee Arenberg: The Captain

Mike Rivkin: Soldier No. 1

Gary Kelley: Soldier No. 2

An Actors’ Gang presentation. Executive producer Tim Robbins. Producer Mark Seldis. Assistant producer Michel Chenelle. Associate producer Paul Fagen. Director Brian Kulick. Playwright Georg Buchner. Adaptation Han Ong. Sets and costumes Mark Wendland. Lights Kevin Adams. Sound design Nathan Birnbaum. Stage manager Susan Heimbinder.