Cultivating the unexpected

The Robert Wilson version of Georg Buchner's "Woyzeck," with music by Tom Waits, is an astonishing show. Wilson's vision, his painterly use of light and meticulous cultivation of the unexpected are unlike anything ever before seen on a Los Angeles stage. And that is because, with the arrival Tuesday night of "Woyzeck" at the Freud Playhouse, UCLA, Los Angeles has, at very long last, broken its Robert Wilson curse.

It's been almost 20 years since the first plans were made for Wilson to create a 12-hour opera, "the CIVIL warS," with German playwright Heiner Muller and various composers, as the centerpiece of the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival in 1984. Different segments were produced around the world but, after losing an Olympic-size funding marathon, Wilson never got to assemble one of the most venturesome opera projects of our time. UCLA's commission of a Glass-Wilson work, "Monsters of Grace," in 1999 got sidetracked into a disappointing digital 3D film.

But with the import of "Woyzeck" -- created for the Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen two years ago and brought to UCLA as the culmination of its first International Theatre Festival -- a new, if eccentric, day has dawned for Los Angeles theater.

Left unfinished by Buchner, a German medical student and political agitator who died at age 23 in 1837, "Woyzeck" is the story of a simple soldier oppressed by his superiors, abused by medical science and driven to kill his mistress in a fit of jealousy. The play's fragments haunted 20th century German theater and became the subject of Alban Berg's opera, "Wozzeck."

The Wilson-Waits "Woyzeck" is black cabaret shot through with breathtakingly lurid color. Wilson's theater of images transcends language. When he stages classic and contemporary plays and operas, he always illustrates them as pure fantasy. He cares nothing for psychology or character motivation. Instead, he likes to see what happens when he lets his consciousness stream, and then, in what might seem an impossible contradiction, he controls with cool, precise, minimalist movement, gesture and design. It's a big deal when characters touch, and quite rare.

The collaboration of Wilson and Waits -- who also worked together on "The Black Rider" and "Alice" -- is the shock of cold and hot. Waits' music, written in collaboration with his wife, Kathleen Brennen, is gleeful mockery of angst, with simple but deformed tunes, impaled oom-pah-pah accompaniments and deliciously mean lyrics.