Those who are eagerly awaiting the play Spring Awakening due to the hype surrounding the musical of the same name will be in for an unanticipated, though not unwelcome, surprise. Gone are the sleek, former-pop-musician-composed songs and the single dominant love story.
The play, which serves as the basis for the musical, features the same overall plot but emphasizes a larger mix of characters and controversies, including a group masturbation scene deemed too illicit for the typical Broadway-goer's eyes. Opening tonight at 8 p.m. in the Sheafer Theater, the Department of Theater Studies' Spring Awakening is indeed a mental stimulant, impressive with its unexpected layering of palpable angst, sensitive humor and surreal absurdity.
Spring Awakening was first written in 1890, although it was not officially performed until sixteen years later. Its relevance despite its age is one of the reasons for the play's great appeal.
"It [is] one of those plays that is actually a hundred years old but seems incredibly modern," said Neal Bell, a professor of the practice of theater studies and the play's dramaturgist who played an influential role in the selection and research of the play. "It was doing certain things I didn't think contemporary plays were doing in terms of subject matter and doing it in an unconventional way, poetically and comically."
Chronicling the lives and transformations of several young students as they experience sexual awakening in the midst of a repressive German society, the show certainly emphasizes issues that are anything but outdated.
"It was banned for a long time because of its subject matter of abortion, suicide, rape, homosexuality-all these big, weighty questions," said junior Julie Berger, the assistant director. "So I think that people tend to connect with the subject matter in general. It's just as relevant today as it was then."
Where the show is at its most controversial is in its unflinching portrayal of the consequences of a society that leaves its adolescents ill-equipped to deal with their rapidly changing identities. One of the protagonists, Wendla, played by senior Madeleine Lambert, gets disastrously pregnant without understanding why, as her mother refuses to tell her the truth about how children are conceived. Similarly, the stress of his parents' disapproval upon his expulsion from school drives young Moritz, played by senior Dylan Parkes, to commit suicide.
"It really tackles conflicts that we deal with as we start to be sexualized, and as we start to gain information about sex and to make major life decisions based upon that information," said Jeff Storer, the show's director and a professor of the practice of theater studies. "In this particular society, the parents talking to children about sex doesn't happen, and so what you see is the effect of that repression, and what happens when that information is not something that's exchanged."
Yet despite the play's clearly conveyed message, the author Frank Wedekind did not mean for it to be solely didactic-the favored interpretation of the work when it finally gained recognition.
"It's [Wedekind] trying to tell an interesting story in an interesting way about these particular problems," Bell said. "It's not a problem play, it's not a message play, it's not a Lifetime movie of the week about teen angst."
In the Duke production, the moments when the play deviates from the normal narrative are its strongest.
"The play is a very strange bird," Storer said. "It goes from very naturalistic scenes to expressionistic scenes."
An overall stand-out scene that also epitomizes the play's shift into expressionism is the opening to the second act, when one character is brought into a tribunal of teachers as a result of a perceivably obscene note he wrote. The gray-wig-bedecked teachers stand posed like grotesque puppets on the upper level of the stage, chanting in unison and hissing at the boy, giving the scene the overall air of a surrealist nightmare.
The show also does an admirable job capturing several key moments of the plot with an ideal amount of haunting poignancy. An effectively disturbing scene in which Wendla asks the other main protagonist, Melchior, played by Davis Hasty, Trinity '07, to beat her leaves the audience cringing. An equally powerful scene includes two boys sharing their first kiss, which succeeds in evoking a realistic, not cloying, tenderness.
The play's highly successful execution aside, the show promises to be an interesting way to evaluate what Storer views as a central question: "Are we any better off now as a society than we were then?"
Spring Awakening will be performed in Sheafer Theater April 3-5 and 10-12 with 8 p.m. showings Thurs.-Sat. and 2 p.m. showings on Sun. Tickets will be $5 for students and senior citizens and $10 for general admission.
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