Review: Misery is Still the River of the World in Adult Film's New "Woyzeck"

Woyzeck

Written by Georg Büchner

Translated by John Christopher Jones

Directed by Seth Bockley

Assistant director: Debbie Saivetz

Presented by Adult Film at Modern Sweater

4-78 Onderdonk Ave, Ridgewood, Queens, NYC

July 15-August 15, 2026

Front: Madeline Bernhard and Ryan Czerwonko. Photo by Geve Penn. 

In the introduction to his 1971 edition of Georg Büchner's (1813-37) surviving plays, Victor Price calls Woyzeck, composed from late 1836 into early 1837 and left incomplete when the playwright died from typhus at age 23, "the first working class tragedy" (xviii). While the extant plays by Büchner–Danton's Death, comedy Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck, with Pietro Aretino having been lost–share a sort of existentialism avant la lettre among their primary characters, Woyzeck represents an outlier among this small group in terms of its style. If Woyzeck is unfinished (though Price argues, in the Appendix to his edition, that it was quite close to its final form), to modern sensibilities, the play's structure as "a series of key dramatic moments" with "terse dialogue" and "haunting fragments of folksongs" (xx), along with its class politics, feels very contemporary. First produced in 1913 in Munich, Woyzeck has made its way to Ridgewood, Queens, this summer as the inaugural performance at Modern Sweater, a former sweater factory turned arts venue. This sensational new, site-specific production, which uses a translation by the late John Christopher Jones, comes courtesy of Adult Film, who masterfully immerse the audience in the surreal, apocalyptically tinged breakdown of Büchner's title character.

Randall Jaynes and Megan Metrikin. Photo by Geve Penn. 

Woyzeck (Ryan Czerwonko)–full name Friedrich Johann Franz Woyzeck–is a poor soldier in a relationship with the prepossessing Marie (Madeline Bernhard), with whom he has an out-of-wedlock child. Woyzeck serves as barber to a captain (Randall Jaynes) who calls him "cretinous" and reprimands him for his lack of morals in their first scene together. He also serves, in order to make extra money, as a guinea pig for a doctor (Megan Metrikin), who, among other things, controls his diet and expects regular urine samples. (An impoverished person selling access to his body for medical experiments is another way in which the play seems quite contemporary.) Woyzeck is happy with Marie, if a bit paranoid otherwise, as we see in an early scene with his friend Andres (Trevor Clarkson) in which Woyzeck talks about perceiving movement in secret tunnels, a fiery sky, and the sound of trumpets. However, when Marie and her friend Margaret (Stephee Bonifacio) see a passing military patrol, Marie's head is turned by the drum major (Taylor Petracek). While Margaret is equally appreciative of the drum major's attractiveness, it is Marie who takes action. And when Woyzeck eventually discovers what is going on, it destabilizes his world even further.

L to R: Trevor Clarkson, Madeline Bernhard, and Ryan Czerwonko. Photo by Geve Penn.

Adult Film's Woyzeck opens with a visceral acting out of Marie giving birth, signaling the production's emphasis, amidst the play's themes of human(s and) nature, morality, class, and gender, on embodiment. That emphasis sometimes takes the form of charged moments of eroticism–Marie alone, Woyzeck tending to the captain, Marie meeting with the drum major, the captain and the doctor in the background of a late scene–and a drumstick and a knife (represented by another musical instrument) each carry clear phallic associations. But the foregrounding of physicality also extends to the abject, with bodily fluids such as urine, which becomes a bit of a motif, and blood taking on significance. The motif of difficulty seeing or of blindness might be seen as another aspect of this stress even as it also connects metaphorically with the play's rather dim view of the world. (Marie, for instance, delivers one of a few instances of dialogue reassigned from peripheral, single-appearance characters, in which she relates a fable about in which the earth, moon, and stars reveal their rotten nature on closer inspection by an orphaned child; and giving this speech to Marie heightens the irony that this could also be the story of what happens with how Woyzeck sees her.) The production also expands the role of the figure of the horse in the play, papering one wall, for example, with photos from the nineteenth-century photographic Horse in Motion series, which itself was a science experiment, meant to reveal the true mechanics of a horse's gait. (And in addition to the doctor's experimenting on Woyzeck, this horse imagery evokes something more along the lines of Dr. Moreau at a couple of points.) At the same time, these photos represent an overlap of science and art (as cinema), with science in the form of photographic technology enabling the birth of cinema. Fittingly, the horse, which appears in a couple other forms, animate and inanimate, in the performance as well, is often a sexual symbol but is also a body exploited for work.

L to R: AJ Molder, Ryan Czerwonko (front), and Stephee Bonifacio. Photo by Geve Penn.

As Price has it, Woyzeck "defies any attempt to put it in a category" (xviii). At the inspired hands of Adult Film, Woyzeck can often feel like a fever dream, one that shades into horror at a few points. A scene in which Woyzeck hears voices whispering from all directions, exhorting him to commit an act of violence, is effectively unnerving, and a late appearance by Marie lands somewhere between a J-horror and a Jean Rollin film. Price identifies Woyzeck as a "killer who is also a victim" (xix)–though his assertion that the protagonist is the first in literature to be so seems highly debatable–and one character in the performance comments that they "haven’t had a murder this good for ages," casting suffering as entertainment but also perhaps pointing again to category. Büchner took inspiration from the real-life case of Johann Christian Woyzeck (1780–1824), so, in a way, we might view Woyzeck, like the 1592 Arden of Faversham, as part of a tradition of proto-true crime drama, one more way in which the show feels very much of our moment.

Ryan Czerwonko. Photo by Geve Penn.

Adult Film also augments the musical aspects of the play, taking its "fragments of folksongs" and weaving in snatches of songs from contemporary artists. This music, along with more atmospheric, score-like accompaniment, is played live by Bonifacio, who also arranged the music, and AJ Molder, both of whose costuming boasts what we might call a carnival cabaret look (think Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn crossed with The Dresden Dolls). The contemporary musical artists incorporated–such as PJ Harvey, Hole, Fiona Apple, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs–are mostly women or female-fronted bands, which underscores that we are watching Marie's tragedy as much as Woyzeck's. Marie, though she exercises her own sexual agency, is objectified by men, while Woyzeck is objectified by institutions (medicine and the military). And the presentation of the character of the Idiot (Trevor Clarkson) as cross-dressed adds another layer to the production's representations of gender. The Idiot is imbued with an (again, very tactile) orally fixated childishness by Clarkson, and he is treated as a kind of Christ figure in one scene by Marie, whose warring frustration, desire, and guilt Bernhard charts in an outstanding turn. Czerwonko is similarly galvanic as his intermittently manic Woyzeck increasingly struggles under the weight of converging pressures, many of which come from Petracek's confidently masculine drum major, Jaynes's somewhat louche Captain, and Metrikin's demanding, aggrandizing doctor, whose offhand comment about a cat was one of our favorite comedic moments in the production. The cast sprinkles effective touches of audience interaction into the show, and they make good use throughout of their proximity to the spectators in the intimate space of the venue. The staging makes great use of different parts of that space, including the door to the outside, and Josh Barilla's production design meshes perfectly with the postindustrial setting, from the actors snapping on fluorescent overheads to take us to the doctor's laboratory to the extraordinary set design involving a bare wooden frame with a platform and lights beneath that can be raised and lowered by winches in the ceiling. With this Woyzeck, as with their recent stagings of Chekhov, Adult Film has once again delivered a vital, dynamic new experience of a classic work of theater.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards