Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
About the company
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 often 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.
Spring Awakening
BOX OFFICE 843-773811 shows only
Tickets: $22.50 Adults $16 Students $15 Groups
Evenings: Wednesday to Saturday, 8:00pm
Matinees: Tuesday/Wednesday 12:30, Sunday 2:00pm
http://www.persephoneproductions.org Audiences can post their comments about Spring Awakening on the Persephone Discussion Board.
About Persephone: Created in 2000 by Artistic Director Gabrielle Soskin, Persephone Productions was founded with a mandate to provide much needed work experience to emerging professional theatre artists in their respective areas of expertise. The company is committed to doing excellent plays that are innovative and of social and literary significance. After an almost sold-out run of its inaugural production Anna Karenina, the company went on to produce numerous other acclaimed productions including West by Steven Berkoff (MECCA nomination), Kindertransport by Diane Samuels and Suburbia by Eric Bogosian (MECCA Award for Best Independent Production and Best Director for Gabrielle Soskin). "I am really proud that the productions we do provide such terrific showcases for the wonderful talent of our professional young artists," enthuses Soskin. "Many of the actors who have performed with Persephone have gone on to work on Montreal’s major stages."