Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind
Unrealised Project
Spring Awakening strikes some very familiar chords in my life and I can understand both the perspective of Wendla being curious about sexuality and to some extent, her mother’s drive to hold on to her innocence and girlhood. Children grow up so quickly and sometimes it is hard to grasp just how quickly they change. Yet that desire to know more about the world, to understand events that happen is common in every evolution from child, to teenager, to adult.
The most beautiful part of Wedekind’s Spring Awakening is that the story is still current. He was a revolutionary in his day and still, a hundred years later, we have not caught up to him. Sex is still often treated as taboo. Religion and Christianity in particular create heavy moral trappings and guilt.
I find kinship with Ilse as well. Cast out, a black sheep in pursuit of her freedom and liberation, she finds out that the world is not always what it is cracked up to be. In my Spring Awakening, we are in an old world Mennonite colony, middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, in the early 1960s. Ilse leaves to meet the burgeoning bohemian revolution in Greenwich Village. In contrast, the heightened characters of the reverend, doctors and teachers are based on more Victorian lines, trapped under rules and tradition.
My hope is that in watching my production of Spring Awakening, the audience will leave with a renewed sense of hope in following Melchior’s journey but also the awareness that our work is still not done.
