Chilling.

People have already commented on it, but this speech is the greatest of Buchner's predictions. The moon was a piece of rotten wood - something we wouldn't really find out until 1969. He is trapped in the cold godless universe of Isaac Newton, flavored by his own aptitude for metaphor and his internal darkness.

What a great set of lines. The stage directions here are so simple - they fight and woyzeck loses, but really taking the time to imagine how a director would block out this interaction makes it so much more terrifying. and then the fart line. christ. Buchner was doing action hero one liners before film was even invented. I feel that everything he did was ahead of its time. It's a theme when I talk about him. As for Woyzeck, this scene makes it worth talking about the randomness of the horror that happens to him. At least in the tragedies of the Greeks and Shakespeare, you know why your life is bad, and usually you earned it. But with Woyzeck, the suffering has no meaning and no apparent cause. It just happens - and this is often how we experience suffering in real life. Like Buchner's illness - it came out of nowhere and unleashed its carnage nonetheless. It's a difficult reality to swallow, but it feels very true.

I want to take a moment here to toast the strength of Buchner's similes and metaphors. Only Shakespeare had this level of ingenuity in comparison. This play does a really good job of leaning into language and its many tricks, and the open razor image is such a good way to describe woyzeck as well as to enhance the vibe of the piece. It is fast paced, dangerous, and bloody.

I think it's important to talk about the roughness and brevity of Buchner's life - it's something that I think a lot about when I think of him. He died at twenty three years old after a life of difficult and dangerous political activism. His life was cut short suddenly and randomly, a manifestation of the chaos of the universe he so frequently wrote about. I wonder what else we would have from him today if he lived longer. Like Jimi Hendrix. Buchner achieved the prestige most writers dream of, of being decades ahead of his time, of making it into the history books and the western canon, but the content of his life itself was mostly suffering. So can we envy him? Really? Envy his talent in youth, maybe. But that's only part of a life. Also, it's interesting that he was a doctor in anatomy. What is it about doctors that make such good playwrights? Looking at you, Chekhov. Makes you wonder if theatre is worth studying when the greats could do without. Buchner makes me think too much...

At this point I've answered my own question at the beginning... I think Kristin is the odd one out just for the fact that she's been asleep the whole play. The real drama is between Jean and Julie. But maybe Kristin comes in as a "returning warrior" at the end.

I keep thinking I know what their relationship is and then get blindsided... was he lying about loving her? Using her for capital? Probably. Then I believed his story just as a woman might have. I feel pretty gullible... yeesh.

This is a brilliant revelation of Jean's character. He has certainly spoken the most in the play so far - his monologues are long and beautiful, but it is at this point that we see how much he has planned this. He begins the play by saying how crazy and insufferable Miss Julie is, but this love, this plan for escape, could not be performed. I'm rooting for them - and he has me convinced about the hotel life. It sounds like a great life! It feels like Strindberg is establishing this as the happy ending, but we'll see if it happens...

A lot of these lines so far are way more verbose than you get used to reading in modern plays. If Mamet wrote this she would probably just say something like "shit" instead of this eight word set of three sentences. Modern playwriting seems to prioritize brevity in a way that these older plays don't do as much. It's not really about plot or content or anything, just how people speak. Maybe it says something about the character. A nervous thing? A sign of dull intellect? A lot of words for no added thought - could be a sign of someone who wants to be appeasing in conversation by affirming how intently they are listening.

It's cool that there are 3 characters! Seems like this would be easy to perform/direct. Is it done often? I'm bracing for a lot of character dynamics. Two women and a man - feels like a No Exit dynamic. Three characters in a comedy means someone is always left out. Instant question - who ends up together and who's the sucker? Is Miss Julie, the title character, going to be the romantic interest or the scathing woman? Also, is this going to be sexist? I wonder how well it will prove to hold up in 2022. We'll see!