'Awakening' to crotch-grabbing allegory

Frank Wendekind's Spring Awakening is a dangerous treasure. An almost pastoral riff on adolescence set in the sterile halls of a German school and the fertile surrounding woods, the text treats its young characters like holy bioreactors, handling each precious one with rubber gloves.

The gloves are off in the new production by J.J. Lind, SM '98. Resolving for us all Wendekind's ambiguities, Lind substantiates the author's distant sentiment with flagrant in-vocations of hard-core porn--an interesting approach given the play's stress on the innocence of its sexual discoveries. In a sometimes bombastic panegyric to Subtext, both real and imagined, Lind pushes the envelope every which way he can to illustrate the naïvité of adolescence to a condoms-in-high-schools crowd.

And surprisingly (if inconsistently), the approach works wondrously. When this show clicks, it clicks in deeply stirring ways. Taking the initial leap of faith is one's biggest hurdle: if this play chronicles the students' sexual awakening, why are they already practically humping each other before the lights even come up? And what are we to make of the two main characters' implicit, longstand-ing love affair, when they've only just started "feeling their manhood?"

Lind is perhaps overzealous in burdening the characters with so much outward sexual baggage--baggage that Wendekind is careful to portray as dangerous precisely because it is all pent up inside.

But overcome that hurdle (Act One's flawless pacing and brutal energy make it surprisingly easy to overcome), and one is delighted to find that in fact, Lind has a firm thematic grasp on the piece, even if it is buried beneath a lot of crotch-grabbing.

The production faithfully explores the fatalistic connection between sex and death: sex being the death of innocence, and death being the ultimate way to thwart our bodies' sexual betrayals. Lind makes this strikingly clear in the play's brilliant repeated gesture: open arms signifying a budding flower, invoked at moments of masturbation, seduction, rape, and suicide.

The theme is also driven home by the riveting scene between Moritz (Mike Pastor, TC '98) and Ilse (Maia Brewton, DC '98). Unable to cope with his burgeoning sexuality, Moritz displaces this sexual failure into academic failure, viewing his inability to become an adult as the fault of his mind and not his body.

In his confused flight into the primal woods, he encounters Ilse, who left school long ago and freed herself to the natural forces within her--and the more dangerous forces of the woods. Their encounter is the play's most fully realized example of the sexual urge's ultimate manifestation: the act of dying.

Lind's strengths are also apparent in the bounty of humor he finds in the play, and in the subtle touches he uses to portray friendships, especially between girls. He falls into trickier territory when he coaxes homoerotic imagery from the text. Though certainly present in Wendekind's language, Lind reshapes these images into a vision in which all boys, pre-puberty, are lascivious homosexuals; and all men, after learning to love and hurt women, are forced to return to their homosexual past. It's a bizarre but strangely affecting twist, made plausible mainly through the tender scenes between Moritz and his best friend, Melchoir (Louis Cancelmi, SY '00). Cancelmi's Melchoir is a brilliant but jaded philosopher, in love with his friend's innocent optimism. While the play's other homoerotic elements essentially fall flat, the love between these two is not only plausible, but tangible.

The characterizations of the adults are more muddled, and compound an overlong Act Two. The production needs to decide when we stop laughing at the grown-ups and start fearing them as the perpetrators of a deadly repression. Still, many performances stay strong throughout the play: Angela Manapat, TD '00, as a beaten youth; Liz Vacco, SM '00, as Melchoir's ill-fated lover; Lauren Popper, '01, as her conflicted mother; and a brief but memorable turn by Genia Michaela, JE '99, as a pastor who reveals all of religion's flaws in one short sermon.

The set, by Clayton Binkley, SM '99, is functionally brilliant, but leaves one constantly fearing for the actors' lives--although that fear may, in the end, be the closest the production comes to realizing Wendekind's original intentions.

In fact, Wendekinds's original intentions surface in all the most unlikely places. Frequently gratuitous, Lind nevertheless finds a truth in the play that the audience is forced to acknowledge, even against its will. He may have taken the gloves off to handle, and even exploit, his characters--but at least we never stop fearing for the well-being of each precious bioreactor.

Back to A&E...