TROUBLE IN MIND.(Guinea Pig Solo)(Bug)(Theater Review)

At the time of his death, in 1837, Georg Buchner, the influential German dramatist, novelist, and essayist, left behind some unfinished works. Of them, "Woyzeck," a morality play that details a lowly soldier's slow descent into madness, remains the most significant and the best known. The story of "Woyzeck" was based on that of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a German soldier and barber who murdered his lover in a jealous rage in 1824. Like the real man, Buchner's Woyzeck is exploited and beaten down by a number of forces: an Army captain who censors his subordinates' attempts to exercise free will; a regimental doctor who uses him as a specimen for a study on human behavior; another man who cuckolds him and then laughs at his despair. Something of a Teutonic Pierrot, Woyzeck does not know what to do with language. How could words convey the circuitous path that his inner life takes? He is lost--caught--in the thickets of doctrine, betrayal, and powerlessness. But his nobility and pathos pervade the play, too, partly because Buchner lets us see his protagonist hacking his way through those thickets--with nothing more than a penknife.

In Brett C. Leonard's ambitious adaptation, "Guinea Pig Solo" (a LAByrinth Theatre Company production, at the Public), Woyzeck is re-imagined as Jose Solo (the brilliant John Ortiz), a veteran of the current war in Iraq, who finds himself trapped in post-September 11th New York. Jose has the eyes of a stuffed panda, glistening with vacant hurt. In the play's opening scene, he stands beside a hot-dog-stand umbrella, hawking his wares. "I got hot dogs," he chants. He pauses. "I got muffins." Beat. "I got coffee." Jose's tone is one of entreaty, but for what? Before we can answer the question, he has scaled the wall to his right. He hangs there from a metal bar, like a solitary child on a jungle gym longing for someone to come out and play. We could buy a muffin from Jose, but we can't save him from the thoughts and images that haunt him still, making his eyes a force field of melancholy, drawing us in.

In addition to selling hot dogs, Jose visits the local V.A. hospital, where he becomes a paid subject in an experiment that is meant to erase the horrors of war from his memory. He also works at a barbershop--New York is the home of the multitasking poor--where he has to listen to the banal pronouncements of Charlie Sansome (Richard Petrocelli), a policeman and a veteran of that other war, the one in Vietnam: "Made some friends, lost some friends. Give an' take. . . . Give an' take, up an' down. This is life. The good, the bad--the in-between. Made me the man I am today." Charlie is a blowhard, especially on the subject of women ("Heart gets a little boom-boom-boom, activity begins stirring in the pants. . . . This eternal love crap, Joey. It's for the fuckin' birds"). But it's love, love as it existed in the past, not the present, that obsesses nearly all of the characters in the play.

Of course, Jose's dream of financial security and his dream of emotional security are one and the same--he longs for a cushion to shield him from the various blows that life has dealt him. He is also struggling to win back his girlfriend, Vivian (Judy Reyes), and their catatonic son. In alternating scenes, we see Vivian passing time with her friend Nikki (the very funny Portia), all the while hoping for something better, something more. When Nikki points out that the handsome police officer John Rodriguez (Jason Manuel Olazabal) seems to have taken a shine to her, Vivian reaches, with some trepidation, for a new dream. John, she imagines, will at last free her from the memory of Jose's pain, and from his unreasonable demands for love, which have left her where she is now: sitting in her kitchen, smoking cigarettes and staring into space. As ...