In 1981, Bread and Puppet Theater toured Germany performing “Woyzeck,” their version of German writer Georg Buchner’s sad, bleak, femicide play, which he left in unfinished fragments at his death in 1837. “When the whole world seems to be going up in flames, I’ve heard a terrible voice talking to me,” Woyzeck cries in this show about a soldier feeling desperately trapped by his life, ordered about, a servant to officers, shining their boots, shaving their beards, while his wife carries on an affair with one of his superiors, until Woyzeck murderously lashes out.
“Unfortunately more than relevant,” Bread and Puppet co-founder Peter Schumann said at a “talk back” after the company performed a sharp revival of the show–using many of the original masks, puppets and scenery, and incorporating fragments of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck” opera–as the culmination of a week-long residency at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire, on Sunday, April 19, 2026. They aim to perform it again in New York in December 2026. “Was appropriately made exactly for the moment of this sad history that we live through. It’s exactly that same melancholy. More than that, total destruction, sadness of this moment in history. And that’s expressed in this play. In terms of poverty and the horror of the bourgeois morality versus the real life. That’s what it is, and here it is again. It’s an amazing play.”
Schumann said, “Buchner wrote it in his early 20s. He died at age 23. He wrote this one and also ‘Leonce and Lena,’ a little comedy, and and then the fantastic thing on the French Revolution, ‘Danton’s Death.’ All of this in this short, short little life. … Buchner I don’t know how he does it, but what he does is totally real, it’s the language of the proletariat, of poverty, of deprivation. … Obligatory viewing for all citizens and migrants to this country.”
“I want to credit Joanne Schultz,” Schumann said. “She directed and she dug out this performance, which was difficult to do. She had to do research. We didn’t have a record of it. So she had to go to various universities, finally found a very poorly made film from the Free University in Berlin, that’s the only record of it she found. And the whole production was based on that very tiny little bit of record that she found.”
