In a sweltering little former sweater factory in Ridgewood, the local theater troupe Adult Film could be found on recent summer nights, diligently putting on their version of Woyzeck, a fragmented piece of German chamber theater from the 1830s, a story torn from the headlines about the life of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a barber from Saxony who made the news for killing a widow he was living with. She cheated on him; he got publicly beheaded.
It’s comforting to know these kinds of stories were always being told, even before Ryan Murphy had a deal with Netflix. So, we waited, in a hot room in Ridgewood, with bated breath, while tinny speakers blared the 2002 song “All the Things She Said,” and two members of the troupe were busily swinging a large slab of concrete back and forth, as if miming employees in a factory at work. It was important to get the vibe just right.
Somewhere in all that rubbery psychological malaise, Ryan Czerwonko, one of the group’s main players, had discovered a showcase for himself as the very angry Mr. Woyzeck. He performs the idea with a kind of easily legible brawny charm; something like a Ridgewood Josh Brolin playing a Bed-Stuy Ethan Hawke, if that makes any sense at all, working and teaching in the borderlands between Ridgewood and Bushwick in a factory space that never got around to installing central air before being repurposed into the arts spaces of tomorrow. But that’s beautiful, isn’t it? If we’re here, we’re probably laden with memories of also being somewhere else too.
As spaces go, this one was particularly notable, because the troupe decided to stage their Woyzeck as the debut production in what the actor Santiago Mallan— who had a cameo in Marriage Story, per IMDB—is calling Modern Sweater (478 Onderdonk Ave.), or what an immediate Google AI hallucination calls “a literal former industrial sweater factory.”
“I am pretty sure that until 2020, Modern Sweater was a functioning sweater factory,” Josh Matteo told me when I asked him, potentially adding to this vital digital compendium of the space’s history. Matteo told me that he felt like there was something moving about all that; the play’s source material of pulpy melodrama and the, umm, sweater factory of it all. He puts it better than I possibly can.
“Our play is a tragedy in part about the exploitation of the working class, so it’s a big confluence of circumstances to do this show in this space, in this traditionally working class neighborhood, just as the neighborhood is also becoming the independent arts capital of NYC,” he said, part of a moving monologue about this stuff he sent me via email before I saw the show. The repeated use of the phrase “working class” impressed me. It felt au courant.
“We are on the outskirts of the city… And the outsider artists are thriving by doing it their own way out here,” he wrote about the distant hinterlands of Ridgewood, Queens, where the company had found its home.
“It’s a working class company, by that, we mean that the company’s classes and tickets are extremely affordable, so that people can be in a constant state of artistic learning and experience without breaking the bank. Most of our students and company members come from working class backgrounds—though not exclusively, all are welcome.”
As staged by Seth Bockley, Woyzeck was a performance of anguished, fragmented intimacy, the story of people whose lives were both tragically unimportant and rendered notable only by the grave darkness of their desires. To play their child born out of wedlock, Bockley employed a thick, heavy accordion, which Madeline Bernhard, playing the doomed Marie, repeatedly sings to. Oh these working people, they’re so crazy. Love them.
At one point, Woyzeck shaves an unnamed military captain (Randall Jaynes), who mocks him in a scene suffused with sticky homoeroticism, or maybe it was the room was just that hot: “My flesh is weak, Woyzeck. But do I abandon my morals? I do not. I’m a good man.”
Woyzeck disagrees. He does kill his wife, after all. In exploring the underpinnings of the tortured psyche of the working classes, two of the troupe’s players do a handsome version of Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” and later the Hole song “Violet.” If there’s anything that speaks to today and yesterday’s working class sensibilities, it’s handsomely curated ’90s grunge rock that I could imagine spun by Carrie Brownstein doing a set on XMU. When they make it to PJ Harvey’s “Down By the Water,” I’m practically cheering with sweat.
Like everyone else in the audience, I love these songs. The sincere engagement with its text, both worn by cliche and also somehow never talked about enough, reminds me of one of the greatest pieces of staged theater this century so far, that episode of Girls with the interactive play based on the death of Kitty Genovese. If this is, instead, a Bushwick fantasy of what hardscrabble musical theater would look like, something as prurient as the people it imagines itself speaking to, it works because everyone in it looks like they’re trying really hard to have a good time, and they are. They turned the test in on time and graduated top of their class, wherever they were from.
In what was Czerwonko’s standout performance, he sings the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Heads Will Roll” in front of the audience, as if daring the sympathetic crowd to do anything, before he runs outside into the street, evoking that other greatest moment of staged theater from this century so far, when Tom Francis used to do the same out of Broadway productions of Sunset Boulevard, running outside onto busy West 44th Street, followed by tracking cameras for all of us stuck inside. Here, we could only imagine how bustling Onderdonk Avenue responded to seeing Czerwonko yelling “dance ’til you’re dead” at them. Maybe he wasn’t even yelling. Either way, that was total class. And he sure was working for it.
Woyzeck plays until Aug. 19 at Modern Sweater, various dates. Tickets are $39.19, get them here.
Photos taken by Geve Penn.
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