Woyzeck

   by Georg Büchner.

   Premiered 1913. Perhaps Büchner's best-known play, Woyzeck was a fragmentary collection of scenes when it was discovered after his death. Its fragmentary nature made Woyzeck a modernist icon after its premiere in Munich, because many saw it as a "proto-Expressionist" drama that explored the mistreatment of a poor unfortunate at the hands of all-powerful institutions. It is at any rate among the first plays in German with a largely inarticulate central character, one whose sufferings define him and whose delusional criminality seems justified. Büchner based the character on medical reports he had read, and in some ways the play employs a clinical distance as a series of disjointed scenes examines Woyzeck's disintegration. Büchner was particularly gifted in creating bizarre yet fascinating secondary characters, whose fractured presence on stage make Woyzeck's disintegration seem hallucinatory yet inevitable.