Written in 1891, Frank Wedekind’s world of Spring Awakening is first and foremost about youth and theirworld: the strict governance of theirparents, the various politics and restrictions of their school, and the redundant sermons of their pastor echoing and affirming the other institutions. Combined these elements create an oppressive world and a dysfunctional system with distant parents being violent and incapable of communicating to their children, school authorities functioning as mechanized and militant autocrats, and a church and its pastor enabling and legitimizing both method and ideology. In short, the world of Wedekind’s young characters is depicted as a realm run by a dominant voice, constantly playing with their fears and dictating a constant rebuke of their discovery of a sexual life.

Spring Awakening_Set Design Sketch. Photo: Christine Jones

With this as the basic gestus of the play, Wedekind’s 19th century play on Broadway may at first cause skepticism and disbelief: “What does Wedekind have to do with Broadway?” one may ask, but such questions and skepticism are answered within the first minutes of the production. Sater’s lyrics capture the situation and spirit of the scenes, while Sheik’s music supplies an ample range of music and atmosphere, ranging from violent and angry, to soft and tender, to sad and melancholic. While the music throughout remains contemporary, the production visuals are a cross between the 19th and the 21st centuries; whereas Susan Hilferty’s costume design evokes the 19th century, Christine Jones’ set design and Kevin Adam’s lighting design (neon lights on the brick walls and color light bulbs hanging from the ceiling) represents a 21st  sensibility.

Spring Awakening_Set Design Sketch. Photo: Christine Jones

Beyond the carefully conceived contemporarization, a second point which made the production successful was that it avoided the traps caused by gimmickry and sensationalization. Instead of panning to the audiences’ preconditioned and expectant minds, Michael Mayer chose to clearly focus on and (re)present  (i.e.“make present again”) Wedekind’s 19th century world and imagination. In his staging, for example, Mayers chose a theatrically honest staging rarely seen in the AmericanTheater: when time came for the actors to sing, they very naturally and in a Brechtian manner, would pull out a microphone from their side pocket, sing the song, put it back in their pocket and move on. Neither Mayer, nor the actors, nor the audience were at any point concerned with the appearance of sound equipment in the scene, ultimately signaling: “It is, after all, theatre that we are doing.”

In the spirit of the production’s modernization and contemporary choices, Christina Jones used the multiple settings of the play - classroom, different homes with different parents, church, graveyard, meadows - to design the space as a single unit with different parts and functions. The set design started before the start of the play, where some audience members were seated on rows of chairs on the stage, next to the band and the carefully arranged artwork on the brick walls. All other audience members could watch and see how the space transformed itself into a classroom. In collaboration with lighting designer Kevin Adams, Jones utilized neon lights on the walls of the stage as well as the theatre, thereby extending the classroom space into the theatre space, at once embracing and inviting the audience to be part of the reality of the play. With this spatial and set configuration, the center stage held a multi-layered platform which, depending on the scene, was used either plainly or with minimal furniture, e.g. a table and a chair, a single chair, or two rows of chairs as in a classroom.

Spring Awakening_Set Design Sketch. Photo: Christine Jones

While the center stage with its center platform constituted the main part of the play’s action - the classroom - to accentuate the classroom’s central presence and activity, both sides of the stage were blocked off with bleachers and chairs. Created as part of the set, as well as audience seating, the bleachers held both audience members as well as the moving, running, singing and dancing cast members. In addition, two upstage doors for entrances and exits, and a central door for the surprise moments, were created. Using the construed and limited parameter marked by the platform, the 19th century desk-chairs and the two audience-filled bleachers, Jones quite remarkably and logically created Wedekind’s classroom space. To add interior details, various paintings and frames were hung on the back and adjacent brick walls, including a large painting of a white horse with writing across it, a painting of a white rose, several portraits and, to complete the classroom reality, a blackboard with chalk writing, and crossed-out words hung on the stage-left back wall.

With such a controlled physical space mirroring the tight and suffocating psychological space and reality of the children, the central platform was used in a theatrical and unexpected manner for the scene in which Wendla and Melchoir come together and make love to one another. Attached to four ropes on the four corners, the platform was hoisted up, while the two young lovers kissed one another and made love. With the platform hung in mid-air, the other students gathered around the platform, holding it by its edges and gently pushing it to and fro, almost as in support of the action. The result of this lovemaking scene was that Wendla becomes pregnant, and forced by her parents’ intervention, undergoes a clandestine abortion.

Wendela’s tragic death is not the only one in the play. Under pressure and fear of being a failure, Moritz commits suicide. After Moritz commits suicide, his father appears onstage, carrying with him a bunch of flowers. Looking into the grave (created by the stage trapdoor) he breaks down, falls and cries, after which he leaves, leaving behind the flowers on the ground. The other classmates replace his position on stage, one at a time, each picking up a single stem of a flower and dropping it into Moritz’s grave and rushing off stage.

A rare production, where tragedy, comedy, material for reflection or entertainment come together, the Broadway production of Spring Awakening had it all. Combined with the music, the energetic and committed acting of the cast, directing, the set, costume and light design, the production was a great success in bringing Wedekind to a contemporary audience.

© Electronic Communications from the International Brecht Society: ECIBS 36.1 (Winter 2008)