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EgoPo's "Spring Awakening' (second review)
Robert Zaller
Spring's rude awakening
ROBERT ZALLER
We casually apply the word “Victorian” to everything 19th-Century, the way some people pour ketchup over everything they eat. But some of the most avant-garde art in the Western tradition was a product of the decades before World War I: Lautreamont’s Les Chants du Maldoror and Rimbaud’s Une Saison dans l’Enfer; Van Gogh and Munch; the theater of Oskar Panizza and Alfred Jarry.
These works would still shock today if they were new. And, in a sense, Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891) is new; the first attempt to stage it in this country closed after a single performance, and it didn’t receive a real premiere here for a century. Philadelphia is now seeing it for the first time in a production by EgoPo, the New Orleans theater company that, stranded here in the aftermath of Katrina, has elected to make Philadelphia its new home.
Wedekind’s play depicts the confused sexual awakening of a cohort of 14-year-old schoolmates in an unnamed city of Wilhelmine Germany. It is not a play about youthful instinct and adult repression, because most 14-year-olds are too hormonally desperate to realize when they are being repressed. Of course, Wedekind’s children are all the more disoriented for being profoundly ignorant. But modern sex education, while it does its best to take the fun out of sex, can’t really take the sting out of its terror. The results are variously touching and calamitous, and among the events that transpire onstage are straight and gay sex, masturbation, abortion and suicide.
The earth, as seen at age 14
The brilliant Act I set (designed by Corey Lunchuck and Nick Lopez) consists of a carpet of wildflowers, with half-opened windows at the rear, themselves stuffed with bouquets. The message couldn’t be more directly stated: At 14, the earth is a bursting carpet of color and scent on which one has no other desire than to throw oneself down with a fellow creature.
The adults in this play don’t really count. They make the children perform Latin declensions. In the first scene of the second act, they are hilariously parodied as a senate of schoolmasters trying to deal with a student suicide but capable of debating only whether or not to open their own windows (they decide, unsurprisingly, to nail them shut). Tragedy makes them grieve but not improve. The children must stumble by themselves through adolescence, alone as they will never be again with love, solitude and death. The last of these, played as a masked man with both remarkable agility and ironic scorn by Terry Brennan, gets the last laugh if not the last line, for what sexuality reveals as its underside is, of course, the Grim Reaper.
Thirty years ahead of Freud
We are accustomed, in these therapeutically neutered days, to equate the youthful propensity to suicide with ego imbalance. But it is in early adolescence that what Freud sagely identified as the paired instincts of Eros and Thanatos are most vividly and threateningly present. Most of us will never know the impulse to life, and the temptation to death, as strongly again.
Wedekind, born in 1864, was actually eight years Freud’s junior, but Spring Awakening anticipates Freudian theory on this point by more than 30 years. If life imitates art, so, often enough, does science— though Freud himself was more properly an artist here than anywhere else in his work.
EgoPo’s artistic director, Lane Savadove, is a disciple of Grotowski, as well as a student of the Berliner Ensemble and Judith Malina’s Living Theater. His work— like that of Philadelphia’s other avant-garde company, Pig Iron— emphasizes a physical and vocal discipline that ultimately goes back to Meyerhold. At its best— and its best is on display here in the 11 performers who handle the play’s 33 roles— this actor-centered theater makes the prissy scatology of, say, Albee, look constipated indeed. For about a century (at any rate, since Brecht), avant-garde theater has been mostly ahead of its playwrights. It is time for the latter to catch up.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read a response, click here.
ROBERT ZALLER
We casually apply the word “Victorian” to everything 19th-Century, the way some people pour ketchup over everything they eat. But some of the most avant-garde art in the Western tradition was a product of the decades before World War I: Lautreamont’s Les Chants du Maldoror and Rimbaud’s Une Saison dans l’Enfer; Van Gogh and Munch; the theater of Oskar Panizza and Alfred Jarry.
These works would still shock today if they were new. And, in a sense, Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891) is new; the first attempt to stage it in this country closed after a single performance, and it didn’t receive a real premiere here for a century. Philadelphia is now seeing it for the first time in a production by EgoPo, the New Orleans theater company that, stranded here in the aftermath of Katrina, has elected to make Philadelphia its new home.
Wedekind’s play depicts the confused sexual awakening of a cohort of 14-year-old schoolmates in an unnamed city of Wilhelmine Germany. It is not a play about youthful instinct and adult repression, because most 14-year-olds are too hormonally desperate to realize when they are being repressed. Of course, Wedekind’s children are all the more disoriented for being profoundly ignorant. But modern sex education, while it does its best to take the fun out of sex, can’t really take the sting out of its terror. The results are variously touching and calamitous, and among the events that transpire onstage are straight and gay sex, masturbation, abortion and suicide.
The earth, as seen at age 14
The brilliant Act I set (designed by Corey Lunchuck and Nick Lopez) consists of a carpet of wildflowers, with half-opened windows at the rear, themselves stuffed with bouquets. The message couldn’t be more directly stated: At 14, the earth is a bursting carpet of color and scent on which one has no other desire than to throw oneself down with a fellow creature.
The adults in this play don’t really count. They make the children perform Latin declensions. In the first scene of the second act, they are hilariously parodied as a senate of schoolmasters trying to deal with a student suicide but capable of debating only whether or not to open their own windows (they decide, unsurprisingly, to nail them shut). Tragedy makes them grieve but not improve. The children must stumble by themselves through adolescence, alone as they will never be again with love, solitude and death. The last of these, played as a masked man with both remarkable agility and ironic scorn by Terry Brennan, gets the last laugh if not the last line, for what sexuality reveals as its underside is, of course, the Grim Reaper.
Thirty years ahead of Freud
We are accustomed, in these therapeutically neutered days, to equate the youthful propensity to suicide with ego imbalance. But it is in early adolescence that what Freud sagely identified as the paired instincts of Eros and Thanatos are most vividly and threateningly present. Most of us will never know the impulse to life, and the temptation to death, as strongly again.
Wedekind, born in 1864, was actually eight years Freud’s junior, but Spring Awakening anticipates Freudian theory on this point by more than 30 years. If life imitates art, so, often enough, does science— though Freud himself was more properly an artist here than anywhere else in his work.
EgoPo’s artistic director, Lane Savadove, is a disciple of Grotowski, as well as a student of the Berliner Ensemble and Judith Malina’s Living Theater. His work— like that of Philadelphia’s other avant-garde company, Pig Iron— emphasizes a physical and vocal discipline that ultimately goes back to Meyerhold. At its best— and its best is on display here in the 11 performers who handle the play’s 33 roles— this actor-centered theater makes the prissy scatology of, say, Albee, look constipated indeed. For about a century (at any rate, since Brecht), avant-garde theater has been mostly ahead of its playwrights. It is time for the latter to catch up.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read a response, click here.
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