Spring's Awakening

by Frank Wedekind, adapted by Evan Drane

Powerhouse Theatre - July 3, 2008

Live Review by Adam McKibbin

Photograph by Albert Meijer

Once called the "greatest turn-of-the-century American playwright" by John Simon in The New York Times, Frank Wedekind doesn't enjoy the mainstream name recognition of America's top-tier dramatists.  That's in part because he wasn't an American at all in a traditional sense - a complicated parental situation led to him having American citizenship papers, but he lived much of his adult life in his native Germany, where he established himself as a formidable satirist.  He served prison time for his scathingly satirical poetry, and when he turned his attention to the stage, his first major work, Spring's Awakening, took years to come to fruition as a live performance.  Once it hopped the pond to America, it was closed down after a single night in New York.  Over a century later, Wedekind's dark piece became a Tony-winning rock musical called Spring Awakening.

The award-winning extravaganza will be hitting Los Angeles this fall.  No fools, the folks at the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble decided the time was ripe to stage their own truer, non-musical and lower-key adaptation (by writer/director Evan Drane).  The company is on a roll, especially when it comes to original material [this year's I Gelosi and last year's Wounded in particular).  Their next installment in the War Cycle is due later this season and should be hotly anticipated by LA theatergoers.

Nowadays, everyone with a television or Internet access is bombarded by the once-taboo themes that power Spring's Awakening (young lust, homosexuality, rape, abortion, suicide - all the biggies).  At the time, Wedekind's work was dark and daring; he paints a picture of young teenagers in desperate situations, unsure of where to turn as they grapple with their desires and struggle to find meaning.  The truth, of course, is that kids today have it a little bit easier; it's less and less likely that a modern-day teenaged Wendla (played by Eleanor Van Hest) would be satisfied with her mother's explanation that babies come from storks, or that pregnancy occurs when a woman truly loves a man - hell, modern-day Wendlas probably don't even ask their mothers.  After all, Google never lies.

Google doesn't exist in Spring's Awakening (set in 1890), and so the kids are left to wander in the woods and try to find answers from each other - with reliably disastrous results.  Two of the three quests come to life here; Wendla, as mentioned above, is desperate to learn the ways of love.  She also feels stifled by her relatively sedate and "normal" life - she hears tales from her friends of abusive parents and, rather than counting her blessings, finds herself longing to encounter such intense emotions.  Van Hest gives one of the most naturalistic performances in the ensemble, showing the sheltered teenager sometimes acting like a small child and sometimes carrying herself like a woman.

Troubled soul Moritz (Nick McDow) has problems of his own:  he's picked on by his classmates, he can't get his grades up, and he's utterly baffled by sex and the beginnings of sexual desire that are stirring feverishly within him.  While the other leads are occasionally distancing, McDow is more of a live wire, providing a welcome blast of neurotic likeability.  He also accounts for a nice chunk of the show's laughs, though the supporting cast helps in this regard as well. 

Both Wendla and Mortiz fall into the tragic orbit of the show's star, the brooding Melchior (Luke Bailey).  Melchior is the worst kind of narcissist:  a teenage one.  He's prone to windbaggy rhetoric and sighing self-pity; Bailey gamely chews through that, but proves less able to establish meaningful chemistry with his co-leads (Wedekind's script is culpable there, too, particularly during a pivotal scene between Melchior and Wendla).

Some of the play's most lingering moments come from the support cast, including a slapsticky depiction of crusty school administrators and an atypical friendship between two other boys in the school:  the nearly bipolar Hans (David Hassett) and the bullying but big-hearted Ernst (Matthew Schueller).  As the leads march inevitably toward tragic ends, Hans and Ernst get time for their own existential crisis, which helps drive home one of Wedekind's big points:  Melchior, Moritz and Wendla - with their crushing collection of character flaws and parental problems and sexual unease  - aren't the exceptions; they're the rules.  Same in 2008 as it was in 1890...it's hard out there for a kid.