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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From Outrage to Hilarity ..., May 17, 2009
... in just one century! There's little doubt in my reading mind that Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (conceived in San Francisco, born in Germany, miseducated in Switzerland) meant to shock the socks off the bourgeois public when he wrote 'Frühlings Erwachen' in 1891. It's a play about teenagers -- yes, Virginia, there were teenagers in 1891 -- doing things that even adults couldn't do on a conventional stage; there are explicit scenes of rape, suicide, homos*xuality, and mast*rbation. One teenage girl is a debauched artists' model, and a childish playmate! One 14-year-old girl is beaten and abused by her father, and another envies her for it. The latter pesters her mother for the 'secrets of reproduction', finds herself incomprehensibly pregnant after the rape, and dies in an ab*rtion.
"Spring Awakening" was first staged in Germany in 1906, in a heavily censored version. It played in New York for one day in 1917 but was condemned as obscenity. I wonder, would an audience in 2009 find this play horribly shocking, or would we smugly guffaw at the 19th Century moralities that it mocks. I have a feeling that the world has been so thoroughly Wedekinderized since 1891 that we'd need real blood and nudity on stage to be sufficiently shaken up. When the central character, the boy Melchior, is sent to the reformatory, for instance, he joins a circle of boys competing for a coin by trying to be the first to spurt s*men on it. That might startle even a New York audience toughened up by David Mamet.
Gnarly stuff, eh? Nevertheless, Wedekind meant his play to be uproariously funny, and it is. The scenes in which the adults - parents and teachers - reveal their utter hapless in consequentiality are fresh and witty still. The unexpected appearance of a ghost, the boy Moritz who'd blown his head off, in the final scene is a brilliant absurdity. This translation, by Jonathan Franzen, seems to me to catch the sardonic tone of Wedekind's original German very effectively. Even if you may never see a decent production of Spring Awakening, it's well worth reading, as the first vernal flower of the modern theater.
There is another listing on amazon of exactly the same book, available for a normal price.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sad but still true reality, December 3, 2008
This review is from: Spring Awakening: A Play (Paperback)
This plays reveals a common theme at the time, the enslavement of young people in Germany within their boarding schools. Törless is the most famous victim of this environment. But here we are dealing with Moritz and Melchior, proving that M&M's is not the best of medicine in life. This total control of the young people's life that has only one objective, to study, to learn Latin and translate Greek, goes along with an absolute desexualization of their psyche in the name of an extreme puritan vision of ethics and life. This causes a depressive existential vision in these teenagers who look for some satisfaction anyway they can, some erotic information and literature, some friendship among themselves as a surrogate of the love they need and are deprived of, even banging up the first girl they find on their road and who knows nothing about love or rather intercourse. This produces a drama, of course. One fourteen year old boy, Moritz, commits suicide in his boarding school that expels his best friend, Melchior, who had passed some information about the physical activities they are all dreaming of, and had impregnated a certain Wendla who will die of an overdose of an abortive drug given to her by her own mother. This sexual information is considered as the unethical trigger of the suicide. Melchior's family then decides to send him to a house of correction where he discovers real evil and convinces himself he is the most guilty human being in the world. He is then tempted by crime or, because of some remnant of ethics, by suicide to put away his good for nothing person. This dilemma is set up on the stage after Melchior's escape from the house of correction in the last scenes in the graveyard where the suicidee Moritz is buried. Melchior is thus, then and there tempted to join his departed friend Moritz who is reaching out for him. But life is stronger and it comes embodied in an unidentified man who steps in and explains to Melchior that life is a long road that can provide all kinds of surprises that death cannot. This play is the matrix of many other plays and films, the most famous film being the Dead Poets' Society. But this play recently found in France its perfect illustration and re-enactment in French teenagers' prisons with several suicides resulting from total negligence if not unethical mistakes from the personnel who considered - and probably still considers - speaking of suicide was some kind of blackmail from the kids, even if they were depressive which was another way of blackmailing the personnel, wasn't it, and some kind of humorous joke to be used as a torturing device by the personnel to satisfy their sadistic and revengeful perversion onto the kids they are supposed to educate to some fair social life. Nothing has changed under the sun, or under the moon as for that. Not even the fate of young people when their society forgets they are human, forgets it takes a whole village to educate one young child, forgets they have to love people if they want to really educate and reform them. But love is the only thing thatis not available in the pedagogical and "professional" minds of these people who are called prison wardens and other personnel.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine, University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From Outrageous to Hilarious ..., May 17, 2009
... in just a century! There's little doubt in my reading mind that Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (conceived in San Francisco, born in Germany, miseducated in Switzerland) meant to shock the socks off the bourgeois public when he wrote 'Frühlings Erwachen' in 1891. It's a play about teenagers -- yes, Virginia, there were teenagers in 1891 -- doing things that even adults couldn't do on a conventional stage; there are explicit scenes of rape, suicide, homosexuality, and masturbation. One teenage girl is a debauched artists' model, and a childish playmate! One 14-year-old girl is beaten and abused by her father, and another envies her for it. The latter pesters her mother for the 'secrets of reproduction', finds herself incomprehensibly pregnant after the rape, and dies in an abortion.
"Spring Awakening" was first staged in Germany in 1906, in a heavily censored version. It played in New York for one day in 1917 but was condemned as obscenity. I wonder, would an audience in 2009 find this play horribly shocking, or would we smugly guffaw at the 19th Century moralities that it mocks. I have a feeling that the world has been so thoroughly Wedekinderized since 1891 that we'd need real blood and nudity on stage to be sufficiently shaken up. When the central character, the boy Melchior, is sent to the reformatory, for instance, he joins a circle of boys competing for a coin by trying to be the first to spurt semen on it. That might startle even a New York audience today.
Gnarly stuff, eh? Nevertheless, Wedekind meant his play to be uproariously funny, and it is. The scenes in which the adults - parents and teachers - reveal their utter hapless in consequentiality are fresh and witty still. The unexpected appearance of a ghost, the boy Moritz who'd blown his head off, in the final scene is a brilliant absurdity. This translation, by Jonathan Franzen, seems to me to catch the sardonic tone of Wedekind's original German very effectively. Even if you may never see a decent production of Spring Awakening, it's well worth reading, as the first vernal flower of the modern theater.
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