Playwright: Frank Wedekind At: Promethean Theatre Ensemble at the Artistic Home, 3914 N. Clark. Phone: 800-838-3006; $20. Runs through: May 9
No, it's not the fired-up Broadway musical currently touring the big rooms. But director Stephen F. Murray rejuvenates Frank Wedekind's 1891 sociodrama with a number of stylish flourishes to render it every bit as immediate, if less shocking, for audiences in 2010 than when its author first proclaimed the folly of adults denying sex education to children confused and frightened by the hormonal changes associated with puberty.
As incredible as it may seem nowadays, when salacious images bombard our culture from every corner ( or so our dirty post-Freudian minds make it appear, anyway ) , there was once a time when adolescents as old as fourteen still subscribed to the theory that the arrival of little brothers and sisters occurred within wedlock exclusively, relying on the assistance of a friendly stork. For those who doubted this myth, vigorously promoted by prudish parents, there were few alternative sources of informationinquisitive classmates who scoured medical books in search of facts were punished for their "perverse proclivities." Is it any wonder that the young pupils at an unnamed school, based on Wedekind's own alma mater, suffer heartbreaking abuse ( some inflicted upon them and some self-generated ) , leading to untimely destruction.
An appropriately twitchy pre-curtain mood is established by aggressively erratic bass-heavy jazz melodies that later bridge scene changes to create an expressionistic ambience, reinforced by the portrayal of authority figures as grotesquely-masked monsters, in keeping with the comical names ( "Sunstroke," "Flykiller," "Bonebreaker," etc. ) assigned by Wedekind to the villains in his agitprop universe. And if this device works only sporadicallyindeed, verging on ludicrous during the final graveyard scene featuring a mystical man/god in a Zorro-like dominoit allows the double-cast actors to play these roles as shallow caricatures, the better to focus their attentions on mining emotional urgency from the quaint, however heavily colloquialized in Murray's adaptation, 1910 translation by Francis J. Ziegler.
The actors maintain a brisk pace as they deftly switch voices and body language to indicate the ages of their widely disparate personaenotably, Cole Simon as the gay boy doomed to unrequited love, whether of a goddess in a picture or a seminary-bound schoolfellow. Tyler Rich's high-strung Moritz and Sara Gorsky's bohemian Ilse likewise forge empathy from Wedekind's proto-Brechtian aesthetic. The results might not be as steamy as the Duncan Sheik version, but still emerge as more engaging than we'd expect of a Victorian-era after-school special.