{Playwright: Frank Wedekind,
translation by Eric Bentley
At: Strawdog Theatre, 3829 N. Broadway
Phone: (773) 528-9696; $18
Runs through: June 28}
Students committing suicide after flunking their exams. Date-raped teenage girls dying as a result of back-alley abortions. Hormone-racked lads adoring, vilifying and finally destroying pictures of nude temptresses (with appropriate quotations from classic literature). A pair of gay youths who fear their love will wane with the coming of adult responsibilities. Boys brutalized in reformatories. Elders benignly ignorant or outright hostile to innocent pleas for guidance. And this is 1891!
Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening marks the transition in German theater from Naturalism to Expressionism, lending it historical importance. Its central dramatic debate—is it better to do what we want, or to do what we ought?—makes its philosophical dimension likewise noteworthy as a reflection of cultural values in fin-de-siécle German society. And Wedekind displays a sensitive accuracy in his replication of juvenile vernacular, even as his elevated realism gradually gives way to fanciful images of Faustian apparitions.
But however interesting, this is still a lot to absorb in the limited time mandated by theatrical convention. Director Stuart Carden and the Strawdog company pull with the strength of percherons to propel Wedekind's lugubrious theses, rendered all the more textually dense by Eric Bentley's scholarly translation. Certainly David Wolf's scenic design provides a compelling motif in the schoolyard fence that bisects the stage, with scenes of repression played on one side and those of liberation on the other. So does Jason A. Tratta's incidental music: the violin-and-cello melody, at once playful and nostalgic, that accompanies our first sight of the schoolboys at play (a game where the victor hits the vanquished in the ass with the ball, both first reciting a Biblical invocation) informs us immediately that misfortune will soon befall these carefree children.
The actors plumb the depths of their craft, imposing nuance and subtext and physical business on their stilted speeches and Carden's stylistic innovations (the school faculty, for example, are portrayed as caricatures corresponding to the nicknames bestowed on them by their charges—'Sunstroke,' 'Flykiller,' etc.). But while the valiant performers succeed in fulfilling each individual moment's psychological assignment, the sheer weight of Wedekind's narrative over the course of three hours cannot help but drag on runners trained for shorter races.
----------------------------------------