This past weekend, a creatively expressive production of “Woyzeck” was performed at the Frear Ensemble Theater as Grace Fruauff ’26’s senior Honors directing thesis.
“Woyzeck” is an unfinished play written by German playwright Georg Büchner in 1836. The play was assembled from three existing manuscripts discovered after his death. Due to the play’s incompleteness, many theater directors in the past have brought it new life by rearranging the script in interesting ways. Though the heart of this production lies in an attempt to expressively depict the exceeding cruelty of a fast-developing society against each of its citizens, Fruauff, juxtaposing the weight of the concern with her whimsy and humor, took on the challenge.
One thing that I found this production does a remarkable job with was how it externalizes characters’ suffering through its creative use of space. The preshow sequence, for example, creates this illusion of prying into the internal world of a person. When the usher opens the door, the audience is greeted with a huge plastic box surrounding the stage. “A box within the black box theater, how mysterious,” I say to myself. The plastic sheet goes all the way up to the ceiling, leaving no window open to the outside.
In the center of the theater lies a forest scene, with tall trunks stemming from the ground that is covered by black turf. 48 seats circle around the edges of the square stage.
The forest is in fact a reference to the first scene of the play’s original text, the 1979 version translated by John Mackendrick. In the scene, Woyzeck is in the forest, speaking to Andres of the terrifying things only he can see: “Freemasons, moving behind me, beneath me,” “a head rolls down it every evening,” etc. While the other scenes of the original play take place in a variety of locations — such as the guard room, the doctors’ lab, Marie’s room, and the tavern — in this production, all scenes take place in the same forest set. Thus, those indiscernible, scary images Woyzeck sees in the forest linger as the play goes on, as if a growing sense of insanity envelops me.
The expressive externalization of the mental world reaches its peak at the terrifying dream-like dance scene of “Starving in the Belly.” At the end of the dance, Woyzeck (Kaito Stohr ’28) lies on the floor talking in repetitive nonsense, while four characters creep over him like wild carnivores, vocalizing the word “starving” over and over. Nico Johnson ’26’s character literally pulls dirt from the ground and scatters it onto Woyzeck’s body. Here, the space transforms from a “tavern” scene back into the dark woods from earlier. What happens in the scene takes the audience on a journey from a realistic dance party into the subjective internal world of Woyzeck: a world where he was bitten and carved up like a pile of meat.
The metaphor of animals is used effectively multiple times in the production to present how human beings are dehumanized in this society, the biggest cruelty at the center of the play that I think Fruauff most eagerly wants to present. “Show your paces now, show them y’r horse sense. Put humanity to shame.” These lines appear in the scene when Showman (Jake Klineman ’29) is ordering a madly clever horse from his circus, showing off how its intelligence is almost comparable to a human’s. This scene breaks the fourth wall as Showman starts to interact with the audience, treating them as if they were part of the play.
As Showman is putting on an impressive show for the audience, he is also intentionally spreading this fear that humans are soon going to be replaced and made obsolete by the wave of technological revolutions. As indicated by some of the quotes from the Doctor and Captain, the fear of a fast-developing society is definitely felt by the characters living in this world. “It’s frightening, how the world turns round in a day,” said the Captain. “You’re an interesting case, patient Woyzeck. It’s a lovely idée fixe. Certain to put you in the asylum,” said the Doctor. In 2026, this scene had a new layer of significance, as it reminded me of how people constantly intensify this fear that AI is replacing humans, taking away all the jobs, and taking over the arts.
What is even more witty about this scene is how the horse in Fruauff’s production is actually played by two actors, Jimmy Nguyen ’28 and Sofia Gavrilova ’29, one acting as the head and the front legs, and the other as the back legs and the tail of the horse. Utilizing the audience’s suspension of disbelief, the production cleverly makes us see these human actors as animals. At the same time, we heard the Sergeant (Nico Johnson ’26) and the Drum Major (Jessica Qin ’28) having a loud, shameless, intoxicated discussion on the plump body and sexual features of Marie (Chanduli Rubasinghe ’29). There is no humanity in this scene, because every human sees the others as animals, flesh, or sexual bodies. By making the audience involved in this dehumanizing process, this scene stunningly achieves its purpose of showing the rawest and most depraved nature of society with its rich and bold theatrical choices.
It does not go unnoticed by me that the play’s titular character, Franz Woyzeck, is a working-class tragic hero. Every event that he experiences brings him closer to insanity. Fruauff’s production aims to direct our empathy to all the play’s characters, with special attention to the women characters: Marie and Grandmother. Interestingly, the first scene of this production is between Marie and Drum Major, instead of Woyzeck.
Marie’s character remains on stage for most of the scenes, sometimes even when other scenes were being performed. Whenever on stage, she is trapped in a small corner, always with her baby, looking out through a small window. With the window being represented by the metal scaffold, the confinement becomes tangible on stage. The moments when Marie is having a love affair with Drum Major seemed to be the only time when she could escape the dim little space she occupied, and the only moments when she is happy.
Interestingly, Qin, who plays the Drum Major, is a woman-identifying actor. In some ways, it is she, a woman who has helped another woman out of her trouble, although it ended up leading to her tragedy. Towards the end of the play, all the women-identifying actors turn into a shadow of Marie. In the killing scene, Woyzeck has to stab the three Maries one-by-one to complete his cruel act. By giving the women characters/actors more presence on stage, Fruauff’s production intends to make the audience think more of the situation of these characters, rather than focusing on the singular tragedy of Woyzeck.
As someone who had read and studied the play beforehand, I am not sure if the characters’ relationships appeared clear enough for all audience members to understand in the current sequence of the scenes. Perhaps because of the very intentional choice to shed light on multiple characters, I found the arc of Woyzeck — being successively attacked and then crushed into a state of insanity, and eventually committing the act of murder — less coherent and a bit weakened. In terms of improving the audience’s experience, especially those who are less familiar with the play, it would’ve been helpful if the acoustics could be improved for speeches to be better projected to the audience. For example, it’s a little sad that I was unable to hear clearly what Grandma’s character said in her story, although it appeared twice in the production.
Overall, I am thrilled and inspired by the boldness and creativity of this production. It is also worth mentioning that the actors I spoke to after the show all talked about the fun they had acting in this play. Stohr and Johnson both mentioned that they were sad that the show is over.
Behind all the creative theatrical choices is the amazing ensemble work that requires a high level of trust and playfulness. Fruauff said to me many times after the production that she feels very, very proud of her actors and all the people in her creative team. As her friend, I am proud of her as well, because she has again, with her lighthearted way of directing, made a challenging work an experimental and exciting process for all the people involved.
