In 2006, Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik added rock, folk, pop music and lyrics to Frank Wedekind’s Spring’s Awakening. It swept the Tony’s. The most salient irony in a story fraught with ironies, is the stunning lack of progress mankind has made since the original play was staged in the 1800’s. Teenagers are still overwhelmed by the onslaught of hormones that come with adolescence. When they seek guidance from parents, teachers, ministers they are still admonished, ignored, denounced. Left adrift in a tumultuous ocean they are ill-equipped to navigate. Instead of getting crucial, practical information, they are failed by authority figures too cowardly to sort through their own discomfort and unresolved issues.
Spring Awakening tells the story of all young men and women, and Melchior, Moritz and Wendla, in particular. Melchior is the rebellious, intellectual atheist, and like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, he is summarily punished for it. He helps out his poor buddy Moritz, who’s so frantic for answers and dizzy with libido, he can’t keep up his grades. The handmade, illustrated book that Melchior authors, creates a stir, as it presents the facts in a forthright, secular context. Wendla, also kept in the dark, seeks respite from Melchior. Naive in such matters, she insists that Melchior thrash her, with disastrous results. Sexuality without a compass can lead to inappropriate impulses, neither of which Wendla and Melchior can process or understand. When they finally consummate in an act of tender lovemaking, Wendla has no idea she’s risking pregnancy.
From the very first time I saw Spring Awakening, I was shocked and jazzed and completely onboard with its angry, unapologetic expression of sadness and disgust for adults that will do anything, anything, anything but level with them. The arrogance, superficiality, and vindictiveness of the grown-ups leaves ruin and tragedy all around. Spring Awakening looks at sexuality without flinching, so it explores disturbing content like incest, abuse, rape, abortion, desperation, abandonment, all running rampant because those in charge believe that shaming, bullying, disingenuousness is the answer to any situation they’d prefer to avoid.
The glorious joy of Spring Awakening is it’s utter lack of patience for the hypocrisy, persecution and degradation the teenage characters are subjected to, for the sake of sparing lame parents. The kids give way to raw, volcanic anger, contempt, despair. They leap in the air, they shout and dance and celebrate their subversive defiance. As much a rebuke of pretentiousness and sanctimoniousness as it is a paean to undiluted emotion, Spring Awakening takes us to the realms of transcendent, exquisite transgression: kicking, stomping, pushing back. Filling your lungs and yelling with everything you’ve got. The realm where sentient, fully functioning souls step up and crush the insects of ignorance, pettiness and fascism.
Uptown Players presents Spring Awakening, playing January 31st -February 3rd, 2019. Moody Performance Hall. 2520 Flora Street, Dallas, Texas 75201. 214-219-2718. uptownplayers.org