Birth of the Non-Hero

Woyzeclc, by Georg Buechner, has cast a deepening shadow across 130 years and a thousand writers. It is as if this young, 19th century German with a mind like burning phosphorus and a heart like an open grave had had an apocalyptic dramatic vision of the 20th century, with its human holocausts, scientific arrogance, uncertain values, private hysteria and despair. Out of this vision, he made a sketchbook of hell--a melancholy intuition, perhaps, of the death that was already seeping through his own veins to claim him at 23. The appeal to self-pitying modern men is that Buechner was the first playwright to cast the hero as victim in a universe seemingly out of control.

Making its U.S. debut in Manhattan, Munich's Bavarian State Theater performs Woyzeck in German (simultaneous translations available) with brilliant fidelity of tone--stark, spare and stinging. Into a landscape of damnation walks Woyzeck, a simple soldier, poor, puzzled, and haunted by voices and apparitions. To eke out his army pay he becomes a guinea pig for a medical fanatic who puts him on a diet of nothing but peas and exhibits him to his students, an experiment no less dehumanizing for being silly. Woyzeck's firmest hold on life is a woman (Elisabeth Orth) who has borne his child out of wedlock. More sensualist than wanton, she betrays him with a dashing drum major, and the crazed Woyzeck, like a conscript Othello, stabs his flyblown wench to death.

But the plot is not the point. Buechner was concerned with destiny, not destinations, and Woyzeck, sensitively played by Heinrich Schweiger, is a lyric dirge to bruised humanity. The play is as durable and compassionate as the line that might have served as its epigraph: "Every man is an abyss, and you get dizzy looking into it."

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