The production intends for the audience to experience madness as well as to be a witness to it.

Kinoshita gives it a "Marat/Sade" edge, suggesting the actors are asylum inmates who happen to enact a play.

The entering audience finds them crouching on the stage floor and in the aisles — grunting, barking, roaring and howling. When they're not playing a character in a scene, they return to their animal sounds and stances.

Woyzeck, played with vibrating intensity by Justin Young, is a barber and an all-around attendant to a loutish captain (Nicolas Logue). He also makes extra money by working as an experimental subject of a crazed doctor (Brent Yoshikami), who has kept him for months on a diet of green peas.

The effect has Woyzeck going mad at an accelerating pace.

The object of his madness is his girlfriend Marie (Danel Verdugo), who has produced a young son for Woyzeck, but continues to have an eye for alpha males — predominantly the drum major (Reb Beau Allen). Ultimately, Woyzeck stabs her to death and then loses all memory of the deed.

Kinoshita does not shy away from the goriness of the drama, but keeps it in steady and heightened focus.

Whispering voices urge Woyzeck to stab Marie in a clumsy murder scene. He wanders in a daze, unable to explain the blood on his hands and arms as Marie chokes to death on her own blood.

Later, once more over the body, Woyzeck doesn't understand that the red line around her neck is the result of his own knife work.

It's a short production, running barely an hour without intermission, but filled with strong images and unflinching directness. Performances are excellent, especially Young's tuning-fork emotional hum and Yoshikami's delirious doctor-babble.