2012 FringeNYC Roundup #1

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Tail! Spin! at Kraine Theater

— Andy Buck

Pink Milk at Gene Frankel Theatre

— Andy Propst

No one can say Elizabeth Chaney didn’t follow the ins-and-outs of Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck when she adapted it to the Appalachians for Dark Hollow, at Theatre 80 St. Marks, but observers may decide that fidelity to a work so resolutely downbeat may not be the best idea for a piece that runs an intermissionless 105 minutes.

The challenge Buchner presents — and Chaney has taken up — is to maintain interest in the hapless protagonist when he richochets through life as an army barber and as the spouse of a loving woman who eventually strays with another enlistee.

Alternately docile and irrationally outraged and in time homicidal, this Woyzeck (Kevin Kash) sometimes barrels, sometimes shuffles through his scenes with stooped shoulders. Indeed, the bent-over, defeated posture seems to be the one concession to characterization that Kash — as directed by Alkis Papoutsis — allows.

Chaney does add something to Buchner’s 1836 work, which is based on a story taken from the 1821 headlines. By opening her version with Woyzeck sitting center stage while behind him a preacher rants and a choir member raves, she implies some of that old-time religion triggered his initial disorientation.

She enforces that view by making Dark Hollow a play with music, much of it carrying religious overtones. The most pertinent inclusion — all are played by a gritty quintet at stage right — is the traditional "Man’s Life’s a Vapor," which repeats the lyric, "Man’s life’s a vapor, full of woes — he cuts a caper, down he goes." And just as the refrain repeats the "down he goes" part, the production keeps up the unrelenting going-down action.

To tell the tale, no less than 17 actors have been recruited, some of whom sing the included songs better than others and all of whom do their best to keep the proceedings involving.

–David Finkle