Phillyist Reviews... Spring Awakening

I would like to begin this review by strongly urging all those who believe in abstinence-only sex ed classes to see Spring Awakening. There has never been a better defense of Joycelyn Elders' opinions on sex education—even though it was written over a hundred years before President Clinton appointed her to the office of the Surgeon General.

I would like to follow up my moderately political endorsement of Spring Awakening by saying, quite simply, wow. It's a strange play, to be sure, but the cast of EgoPo's production of the Wedekind script, quite simply, embraced the strangeness and made it work.

Spring Awakening is about a collection of fourteen-year-olds in late-Nineteenth Century Germany. As you probably remember, by fourteen, you've already started to feel a little funny "down there." And that's essentially what this play is about: the sexual awakening of a bunch of kids who were never taught anything about sex. Most affected by this sudden hormonal change are Melchior (Robert DaPonte), who has decided that he'll just research everything about sex if nobody's actually going to teach him, Moritz (Doug Greene), who is so tortured by his pubescence that he's being driven quite mad, and Weldla (Megan McDermott), who only wants to know where babies come from, and thinks the answer is only "love." In 1891, you simply didn't write plays like this—plays that dealt with abortion, homosexuality, suicide—and so it was banned across Europe for most of the Twentieth Century and didn't see its first performance in America until the 1990s. Spring Awakening, however, has lately gone through its own awakening of sorts: last year, rocker Duncan Sheik co-wrote a musical inspired by the Wedekind play.

The cast of Spring Awakening is not, understandably, composed of a bunch of fourteen-year-olds—we pity the director who tries that one!—but instead made up of eleven of Philadelphia's most talented young actors (in addition to the three mentioned above: Terry Brennan, Kelly Groves, Megan Hoke, Colleen Hughes, Sean Lally, Rob Neddoff, Drew Patersen, and Leah Walton—all listed here because they all deserve credit for a job well done) who not only play the young students, but also (en masque), their parents and teachers. It's not an easy thing to do, bouncing not just between characters, but also between ages. But EgoPo's actors did it with aplomb: in fact, one of the scene-stealers in the show happens at the top of Act II, where all of the teachers at the school have convened to discuss an expulsion: not only are the masks (by Naomi Littell) outstanding, but the scene itself is actually quite funny. (Unfortunately, I saw a half-full Saturday matinee of the production and, for whatever reason, I was tittering alone.)

Another scene stealer in the show is Colleen Hughes' Ilse: a gypsy of sorts who is so fresh and full of life and uninhibited compared to the other girls that you can't help but fall in love with her. A part of me spent the rest of the show waiting for her character's return, which, unfortunately, was only for one short scene in the second act. But the biggest scene stealer of all was the stage itself. Corey Lunchuck and Nick Lopez designed a surprisingly versatile set that I loved to look at: strewn with flowers in the first act, and covered in dirt in the second. (I did spend a lot of the second act, though, feeling a bit sorry for Jamie Grace-Duff, whose excellent costumes ended up filthy by the end of the show.) My only two criticisms of the show, however, are technical ones: the first is that the "dark" scenes in the show were really, really dark and hard to see (partly, I'm sure, due to the Adrienne's lighting grid), and the second is that the stage crew in charge of transforming the flowers to dirt were really quite loud—not in what they were doing, but in their communication with each other—which, frankly, comes across as unprofessional (especially when you consider that they weren't wearing traditional all-black run crew clothing, but were, instead, in street clothes, thereby drawing even more attention to themselves).

If you read our interview with Lane Savadove last week, you know that EgoPo's technique is strongly rooted in the physicality and the feeling of the piece, rather than just in the words of the script. And somehow, by making the words come after the perception, what the actors say is delivered with more power and clarity than if the script came above all else. Sitting in the audience, you're not watching actors act—you're watching them feel. Even with all of the very strange, unrealistic elements of the script, the play felt oddly human. It was impossible not to leave the theatre feeling affected by the piece, and now, four days later, it's still got me thinking.

EgoPo's production of Spring Awakening runs at the Adrienne Mainstage (2030 Sansom) through March 25.

Image of Robert DaPonte as Melchior Gabor and Megan McDermott as Wendla Bergmann courtesy of EgoPo.