So if we go with the interpretation of Woyzeck being the horse, this line asks a question, what is the cause of Woyzeck's metamorphosis? If an animal is just a human without the ability or expression of the ability of reason, and Woyzeck finds himself in a that kind of state by the "end" of the play, what was the catalyst for this transformation?

It was being the horse. Woyzeck, for all his lack of propriety and crassness and paranoia is still a person who is worthy of care and respect. But characters like the Captain and the Doctor, and the conditions of living in poverty, having to give up your dignity and happiness for the sake of survival striped Woyzeck of his personhood, which in turn cost him his family. He was not a human, he was a utility. And that is what drove him mad.

This entire section fascinates me. I definetly understand and can see everyone else's interpretations of the horse's point, what Büchner is trying to say through the Showman's missive about the horse and it's humanity, but I think that like the monkey, the horse is Woyzeck. The monkey represents Woyzeck in his subservience to those in power, a dance monkey that has to do whatever they ask of him because his livelihood depends upon them and their continued satisfaction with him. But I think the horse does as well due to a horse means.

Horses are working animals, and in 1837 they were the backbone of European society. On land, horses are what kept the world moving before the invention of trains and automobiles, they were necessary for transportation, for farming, for trade, and for war all the way up until practically the First World War. So horses on the whole would have been indespensible, but individually? Well, it's just a horse. If you need another you can find another. Expendable in the same way that a poor, untitled solider is expendable. It might be sad for the Captain, if they ever went into battle and Woyzeck didn't come back alive, but there will be other low-rung soldiers willing to do his laundry or chop his wood and shave his face. The same goes for the Doctor, neither care for Woyzeck as a person, only what utility he serves to them. Woyzeck is called almost animalistic by the Doctor many times, and by the end you could say that he's right considering his succumbing to the basest of instincts; jealous, violence, paranoia.

Is the "something" the inevitable fact of our own mortality? Edit: No, but we face mortality by the end.

How much do you want to guess this "something" will be the spectre of war or the horrifying ordeal of being known? Clearly foreshadowing of events to come, but also the themes of the play, I'm assuming.

Edit: I wouldn't say that I was wrong. The "something" that drives Woyzek out of his mind is in fact the theme of the play, though not the specter of war or being known. The "something" is the strain of poverty. Woyzek takes up his odd jobs with for Captain and subjects himself to the experiments of the Doctor to earn extra money. He speaks at length about what it means to be poor, how being poor means you have less room to have morals and standards because you need to eat more than you need your integrity. It is the belittling of the Captain and the abuse of the Doctor and the pressures of poverty that eventually cost Woyzek his family and drives him mad.

The discussion of what is lawful versus what is right, what is just, is such an interesting part of Antigone that I've always loved, but I wonder if this conflict works within this context. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that the army and government that launched and fought the dirty war are unquestionably in the wrong here. I think Coryphaeus taking on the image of Creon might be a bit misleading to me, since I cast him in the role of the authority, the Argentinian government. But I think he represents more the general people who worry about and uphold the laws and morals of the society they live in just because they do not harm them personally and hence they feel no urge to challenge them. He takes on and off the airs of Creon, of the authority, eventually becoming simply Coryphaeus who stands by and allows the demise of Antigona to happen.

I think reading the article before I read the play has made me make so many more connections than I would have otherwise. All of these dismissals of Antigona and her quest to bury her brother take on the voice of the government denying the existence of the people they disappeared and telling the families they left behind that mourning them is useless. "You should stop protesting, you should give up on seeking justice, because remembering the dead is useless, there is no point in remembering someone who is already gone, you'll never truly find them or get them back, so stand down."

I was thinking about the connection between this event and these protests and Antigone as it is, and Antigona Furiosa gives up that ghost right at the start. Antigone centers around burial and what we owe to family, that the right to bury our dead with respect, dignity, and recognition stands above the authority of any one regime. Whereas, these women, The Mothers of the Missing have been denied the right to bury their dead because their government killed them and then denied their existence, again, similar to Creon and his treatment of Antigone's brother who's name I will not attempt to spell. So Coryphaeus saying, "There should be, but there isn't," both admitting fault and mocking her attempts to make it a reality.

There are times when I hate being right. The house is a metaphor for the life that Bruce wants, a "home" for himself that he can build just like he built his last one. His life, as it stands, is a piece of shit barely hanging onto the rafter, standing but a ugly, rotting shell. Yet, sometimes, when he looks at it a certain way, he can see the potential for everything he's ever wanted, to live the way he's always wanted to live, be true to himself the way he's always wanted to. The way he uses the same words Alison uses after her first night with Joan is so poignant, how similar they are even though these parts of themselves never truly overlapped, not in the way Alison wanted. There's an implication, here, that Bruce got so caught up in the weighing of options, that seeing the door nudged open made him reevaluate his entire life, and when he found he didn't have the courage to move forward but couldn't bare going back, stumbled out into the road and stayed there. And as complicated and at times terrible of a man as Bruce was, that is heartbreaking.

She's getting dragged back into it, this is the second time she's had to remind herself that she's just drawing down memories and not reliving them, which then makes the audience remember that Alison, adult Alison, isn't really there. It's the power of the theatre, she's always on stage so we at once ignore her until she draws attention to herself and fold her into the scene as if she belongs there, only remembering she doesn't when she points it out with a caption.

The book he sent her, "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce, is a book about a young man's religious and intellectual awakening. The main character of the novel explores both his religious and personal identities, his nationalistic one as well, and tries to come to terms with all the different parts of himself, as well as with the fact that he is different from what his society expects of him to be in some ways. I've never read it, but I could tell enough to know the book Bruce mentions here has to have been important. And I think it was, it's well established Bruce and Alison speak to each other through books, through the written word. To come out to him she wrote him a letter. I think this was Bruce trying to give a bit of himself to his daughter, show her that he understands her, more than she could ever know, but Alison wanted to hear it from her dad, not James Joyce.

Alison adjusts her speech to express how wonderful she finds this woman, and I love the way she goes from using the typically feminine word for admiration to the masculine one. Beautiful to Handsome. Here she discovers just a little something more about herself, but she doesn't relate to it directly just yet. She sees herself in this butch lesbian but can't bring herself to vocalize that this woman is who she wants to be, not directly. So this entire song is her talking around it and stopping just short of saying it. I've definitely been there.

Wonderful little nod to a wonderful lesbian stereotype. Butches and their rings of a million keys.

Throughout the show I'm trying to dissect what about Allison coming out lead to Bruce killing himself. It's a clear connection in the show, if only because Allison believes that the two are connected. It could be Allison living her truth made Bruce feel suffocated, but this line opens another door. That if they are connected, it might be because Bruce felt like he failed her. He sees his queerness as something wrong with him that makes him do awful things, and it's painfully clear he loves Allison and wants what he thinks is best for her, even though he doesn't take her opinion on the matter into consideration. Good parents always want their children to be better than they are, and I think Bruce does as well, even though his definition of better than him is severely warped by self-loathing and internalized homophobia.

For a moment I was relieved, since it sounded like when Bruce heard the boy's age he gave up and left him alone. And that might be what happened, but considering the way they speak about the incident, it's clear that when he got caught, everyone knew what he was trying to do. As much sympathy as I feel for Bruce, nothing excuses being a predator.

I can imagine that Allison feels some kind of guilt over this, that she grew into who she is, and in turn showed her father everything he could have been, in theory, leading him to feel even more trapped in his life than he already did.

If I weren't thinking about it very deeply, I would think that the modern era of theatre history, where theatre becamen increasingly commercial, would predicate a climate of audience pandering, which is often a complaint made about much of theatre nowadays. But thinking on it a little more, I can see the pattern of playwrights creating what they want to create and saying what they want to say, audience be damned. It's a very dominant attitude even today, behind all of the Broadway glitter.