West Edge Opera: Wozzeck

The final opera in this year's West Edge Opera Festival was Alban Berg's Wozzeck, with Hadleigh Adams in the title role & Emma McNairy as Marie, conducted by Jonathan Khuner & directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer. I am always glad for a chance to hear anything by the Second Viennese School composers, & this powerful, rich, & resonant score is always welcome, & though I had some reservations about some aspects of the production, on the whole this was a strong performance of a modernist classic.

My reservations mostly had to do with some aspects of the staging. The single set is a bank of chairs, with a clinical greenish look, as if we were in an operating theater or a lecture hall. You get a sense of surveillance, often with an educational veneer, & pedagogic techniques made omnipresent & intrusive – all very well, but the seats weren't actually used much. People rarely sat in them or watched from them, so it was more of a potential metaphor than an actual piece of stagecraft. There was a large drain in the center of the stage that was used for a number of things (the site of experiments on Wozzeck, when water is poured on him; the site of Marie's murder, when buckets of symbolic blood are emptied on her; the site of the pond in which Wozzeck dies) & it is, again, suggestive of lives going down the drain, of wasted resources & abilities, but it wasn't quite the centerpiece of the staging that I was expecting.

This brings us to the topic of what we've heard about a production before we see it & how it influences our viewing; I had been told that the drain was absolutely essential & that the use of it was the reason the opera was, against usual practice, performed with an intermission. Maybe I'm missing something (I say that sincerely) but I didn't see how its use made the intermission necessary, & though I was grateful for said intermission (the first time so I could move away from the people next to me – seriously, who brings a bag of crinkly snacks to Wozzeck? – & the second time so I could relieve the ache in my arthritic knees by standing & walking), it really does lower the dramatic temperature to have a break after only about half an hour.

We open of course with Wozzeck shaving his Captain (Spencer Hamlin), who berates him for pretty much anything he does, because he can, being a Captain & all, &  then Wozzeck goes to the Doctor (Philip Skinner) who pays him pennies (to Wozzeck, essential income) for participating in bizarre experiments, such as not urinating (the need to urinate is purely mental!). Both the Captain & the Doctor, strongly sung, very present, are absurdly, cruelly funny in their limited vision & their way of berating & controlling their social inferior. Then the Drum Major (C Michael Belle), with whom Marie will have an affair, comes on. He is plump & preening & very very pleased with himself. The absurdist, cruel-edged humor should continue. Instead, this staging has the Drum Major smack Marie around & then sexually assault her. It's a shame they went for this generic, not to say cliched, approach to this character, as it removes one element of the strange acerbic comedy of the piece by making the Drum Major just another violent abuser instead of a self-satisfied Maker of Cuckolds. Someone like him wouldn't feel that he has to abuse a woman to win her over. And why is Marie attracted to him if he treats her so brutally? Yes, that could & does happen, but that's a different story, not the one the music tells here. (I'm guessing this is a directorial choice & Belle could have provided a different vision of the character.)

The staging, though often evocative & poetic – I particularly liked having the chorus of children coming in on all fours, backs arched, like the feral animals children are, before straightening up & doing their thing – is, as I realized when discussing it with some audience members who maybe hadn't seen the opera as often as I have, perhaps a production that works best if you're already very familiar with the action. The staging of Marie's murder & the discovery of her body is particularly confusing, as she gets moved away from the drain/lake but is still supposed to be in the forest so the children can go gawp at the dead woman – you really have to know the appropriate action already for the staging here to make sense.

McNairy is a commanding presence as Marie (making it even more puzzling that she would just continue accepting the Drum Major after he assaulted her), though it's believable that her life is so emotionally impoverished that the pompous Drum Major could win her with a few earrings. The handsome Hadleigh Adams is an affecting & unusually elegant Wozzeck, though perhaps a bit recessive. That's not an inappropriate choice for a character who is so dominated & beaten down by the world around him & its cagework of social systems, but when he breaks out in violence towards Marie at the climax it's undercut because we've already seen the Drum Major behaving the same way. It becomes just more of the same.

All that aside, any chance to hear this score (led with strength by Khuner) & to see these superb performers is a pleasure. Obviously I didn't agree with all the staging, but better a production that makes you ponder why you don't like something rather than one that makes you sit back & see just what you expect to see.