Energy, Freshness and Naïvete
Spring Awakening, a dramatic comedy by controversial 19th-century German playwright, Frank Wedekind, is a performance by mostly youthful actors rippling with energy, freshness and naïveté. Launched during the vernal season, emerging life for this gathering of friends and rivals, raised in a small German town at the turn of the century, shimmers with an almost painful hope. Employing language that is poetic, stylized and ornate, young hearts open wide, confidences are exchanged; subtle, humorous and fanciful soul-searching is exposed for all the world to hear.
So much for the youths' inner lives as they succumb to the pressures, the sly, secret corruptions of 'the real world.' In an ironic twist on the play's theme and title, this theatrical narrative shifts forward into a greyer more wintry terrain. It echoes the distinctly Teutonic tradition of 'fairy tales cautionary and most grim.' Within a year or two, so many of these interconnecting youthful dramas are destined to play themselves out, briefly bud and flourish, become blighted, wither and die, amidst the surrounding woods, farm-fields and gothic cemeteries of their German homeland.
Yet the agonizing lessons that must be learned are directed, in the first instance, toward a pathetic hovering of custodian adults: fearful rigid over-protective mothers, stern selfish and misguided fathers, grotesque school administrators and negligent callous jailors.
Act Two explodes onto the stage with a truly captivating tour de force: an athletic and vigorous display of 'Commedia dell'arte. Four degenerate and grotesquely masqued characters, inebriated with their own power, conduct the buffoon-like proceedings of an 'Educational Inquisition.' An overt clash of generations ensues. Brutality born of fear. An internecine war fought along the fault-lines of dearly held 'morals' and 'values.' In this noxious climate, all natural instincts and adolescent curiosity become punishable as crimes; the most gifted amongst the youth are arbitrarily banished to the Reformatory. Free-thinking, rational questioning is 'verboten.' Even Goethe's Faust - icon of classic German literature - is genteelly suppressed.
Likewise, in its own day, the play itself was to be censored and suppressed, considered too disturbing, too outrageous and morally degenerate to be publicly performed. In hindsight, this was a chilling harbinger of the future Nazi forces of oppression. For, just a few decades later, the very regime that was to perpetrate mass destruction at home and abroad was also pathologically obsessed with outward perfection, purity and 'family values' as reflected in their state-dominated, state-defined criteria for morally acceptable art.
by Christina Manolescu, Prince Chameleon Press,
Invisible Cities Network, November 14
So much for the youths' inner lives as they succumb to the pressures, the sly, secret corruptions of 'the real world.' In an ironic twist on the play's theme and title, this theatrical narrative shifts forward into a greyer more wintry terrain. It echoes the distinctly Teutonic tradition of 'fairy tales cautionary and most grim.' Within a year or two, so many of these interconnecting youthful dramas are destined to play themselves out, briefly bud and flourish, become blighted, wither and die, amidst the surrounding woods, farm-fields and gothic cemeteries of their German homeland.
Yet the agonizing lessons that must be learned are directed, in the first instance, toward a pathetic hovering of custodian adults: fearful rigid over-protective mothers, stern selfish and misguided fathers, grotesque school administrators and negligent callous jailors.
Act Two explodes onto the stage with a truly captivating tour de force: an athletic and vigorous display of 'Commedia dell'arte. Four degenerate and grotesquely masqued characters, inebriated with their own power, conduct the buffoon-like proceedings of an 'Educational Inquisition.' An overt clash of generations ensues. Brutality born of fear. An internecine war fought along the fault-lines of dearly held 'morals' and 'values.' In this noxious climate, all natural instincts and adolescent curiosity become punishable as crimes; the most gifted amongst the youth are arbitrarily banished to the Reformatory. Free-thinking, rational questioning is 'verboten.' Even Goethe's Faust - icon of classic German literature - is genteelly suppressed.
Likewise, in its own day, the play itself was to be censored and suppressed, considered too disturbing, too outrageous and morally degenerate to be publicly performed. In hindsight, this was a chilling harbinger of the future Nazi forces of oppression. For, just a few decades later, the very regime that was to perpetrate mass destruction at home and abroad was also pathologically obsessed with outward perfection, purity and 'family values' as reflected in their state-dominated, state-defined criteria for morally acceptable art.
by Christina Manolescu, Prince Chameleon Press,
Invisible Cities Network, November 14