Spring Awakening
The play focuses on three teenagers trying to make sense of their newly forming moral and sexual selves even as the bourgeois gatekeepers of knowledge–schoolmasters, clergy, parents–enforce a code of silence on all “adult” matters. Moritz, a below average student desperate to avoid expulsion, can hardly study because of the cacophony of sexual questions in his brain. Utterly ignorant of the mechanics of sex, he’s so shamed by his own impulses that he believes his first wet dream to be “some kind of internal complaint” and fears he’s dying. His best friend, Melchior, shares the fundamentals of reproduction with him in a 20-page handwritten instructional manual complete with illustrations. To Melchior sex is natural and good, at least in his imagination, and he works overtime to suppress his fury at the Christian order that denies physical pleasure but champions self-sacrifice–even though such sacrifice gives a different pleasure to those who practice it.
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For the most part, that process is engrossing. Without steamrolling the rarefied language or rhythmic shadings, the dozen actors who portray youths give their characters’ moral strivings the ache of genuine urgency. Tom Hickey, Kyle Hamman, and Shannon Hoag as Moritz, Melchior, and Wendla respectively offer especially sensitive performances, skillfully combining heartfelt naturalism and gentle parody of their characters, whose idealism sometimes renders them buffoonish: Wendla buries her head under her mother’s apron so that she can listen without visible shame to an inadequate explanation of the birds and bees.
