Brighid Fleming

Long before David Fincher reminded us that dread is hard-wired into the soul, German playwright Georg Büchner wrote a few fevered dramas, then dropped dead of typhus at 23. Now Gangbusters Theatre Company presents Büchner's 1836 "Woyzeck," a true crime tale of a working-class soldier driven to violence by the vicious manipulation of his superiors.

In director Bob McDonald's visceral but uneven adaptation, army grunt Franz Woyzeck (Christian Levatino) is barely able to provide for his sensual common-law wife, Marie (Sierra Fisk), and newborn child. His desperation becomes fodder for a quack doctor (Michael Laurie) conducting dubious experiments and a hulking drum major (J. Teddy Garces) with an eye for Marie.

Büchner's fragment endures because of its fierce vision of a world where human life is mere fodder -- for profit, blind lust, war and worms. On a near bare stage, the nimble cast creates an atmosphere of indifferent brutality, enhanced by Adam Phalen's eerie sound design. If McDonald sometimes strains with the play's absurdist comedy, he zeros in on "Woyzeck's" helter-skelter meld of eroticism and violence.

Levatino gives the title character an arresting stillness, while Garces finds surprising layers in the drum major, suggesting his vulnerability to Marie's charms may be all too similar to Woyzeck's. And tiny Brighid Fleming tells the play's signature fable -- about a boy living in a dead world -- with disarming command. For classic theater lovers, Gangbuster's low-tech, high-impact approach is a strong introduction to this agitated, minor-key classic.



-- Charlotte Stoudt "Woyzeck," Little Victory Theatre, 3324 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 4 p.m. Sunday. Ends Dec. 14. $20. (818) 841-5422 or www.thevictorytheatrecenter.org. Running time:1 hour, 25 minutes