L.A.-based playwright/director Keith Watabayashi has adapted Georg Buchner's "Woyzeck," hailed as the first German literary work with a working class protagonist. Buchner, then declared a traitor by the ruling class, fled imprisonment before dying of typhus at 23. He is today one of Germany's most revered literary figures. Watabayashi has adapted Buchner's tale to contemporary Los Angeles, with Latinos at its focus. Its story of shameful exploitation of the working class, economic and even sexual, and its warning of potentially explosive repercussions to come in the absence of change, seems as timely today as when Watabayashi's predecessor imagined his narrative nearly two centuries ago
