Smells like teen spirit of an earlier day-and it isn't pretty
Spring Awakening still carries a wallop
German drama written in 1892 shattered taboos in its day and remains provocative
Theatre Review by Matt Radz, Gazette Theatre Critic 15 Nov, 2005
After a hard-eyed look at young adults' growing pains with Eric Bogosian's SubUrbia last season, director Gabrielle Soskin reaches back and shifts continents to dramatize the unchanging nature of adolescent angst.
The costumes reflect another era and the kids who are not at all right look younger in Persephone company's new show, Spring Awakening, a seminal 1892 classic by Frank Wedekind, playing at the Theatre la Chapelle until Sunday.
With its roiling sexual turbulence, the 19th- century German town of Wedekind's A Children's Tragedy as it was subtitled, does not seem all that distant from the rubble of broken American dreams entrapping the young adults in Bogosian's melodrama.
Stylistically somewhere between Georg Buchner and Expressionism, pointing the way to Symbolism, Spring Awakening is so frank in attacking religion-driven sexual repression, it took 15 years to reach the Berlin stage and did not make it to London until the swinging 1960s.
A recent translation by the late poet Ted Hughes suits the play's episodic, staccato structure, as does Persephone's simple mise en scene, with only chairs and tables as décor.
Dedicated to showcasing freshly minted acting-school talent, Soskin has put together another attractive, though uneven young cast of 11 to play Spring Awakening's two dozen characters.
Making her professional debut, Kate Fletcher brings a scrubbed-face innocence to her role as Wendla, at age 14 a victim of nascent sexuality she doesn't get a chance to comprehend before she dies after an abortion.
Aaron Turner plays Melchior, the boy who knows too much for his own good. Melchior's roll in the hay with Wendla leads to her death and his schoolboy's sex-manual proves fatal to another innocent, Moritz, played by Oliver Koomsatira.
Tristan D. Lalla is a forceful presence in various parts, especially as Dr. Procrustes during a masque scene in which schoolmasters expel Melchior after deciding that it was reading the sex manual, not academic failure, that drove Moritz to suicide.
The play also includes scenes of group masturbation, sado-masochism, as well as a homo-erotic idyll, and it shattered stage taboos of its time.
Like all great drama, Spring Awakening remains transgressive and provocatively unfit for prime time.
After a hard-eyed look at young adults' growing pains with Eric Bogosian's SubUrbia last season, director Gabrielle Soskin reaches back and shifts continents to dramatize the unchanging nature of adolescent angst.
The costumes reflect another era and the kids who are not at all right look younger in Persephone company's new show, Spring Awakening, a seminal 1892 classic by Frank Wedekind, playing at the Theatre la Chapelle until Sunday.
With its roiling sexual turbulence, the 19th- century German town of Wedekind's A Children's Tragedy as it was subtitled, does not seem all that distant from the rubble of broken American dreams entrapping the young adults in Bogosian's melodrama.
Stylistically somewhere between Georg Buchner and Expressionism, pointing the way to Symbolism, Spring Awakening is so frank in attacking religion-driven sexual repression, it took 15 years to reach the Berlin stage and did not make it to London until the swinging 1960s.
A recent translation by the late poet Ted Hughes suits the play's episodic, staccato structure, as does Persephone's simple mise en scene, with only chairs and tables as décor.
Dedicated to showcasing freshly minted acting-school talent, Soskin has put together another attractive, though uneven young cast of 11 to play Spring Awakening's two dozen characters.
Making her professional debut, Kate Fletcher brings a scrubbed-face innocence to her role as Wendla, at age 14 a victim of nascent sexuality she doesn't get a chance to comprehend before she dies after an abortion.
Aaron Turner plays Melchior, the boy who knows too much for his own good. Melchior's roll in the hay with Wendla leads to her death and his schoolboy's sex-manual proves fatal to another innocent, Moritz, played by Oliver Koomsatira.
Tristan D. Lalla is a forceful presence in various parts, especially as Dr. Procrustes during a masque scene in which schoolmasters expel Melchior after deciding that it was reading the sex manual, not academic failure, that drove Moritz to suicide.
The play also includes scenes of group masturbation, sado-masochism, as well as a homo-erotic idyll, and it shattered stage taboos of its time.
Like all great drama, Spring Awakening remains transgressive and provocatively unfit for prime time.
