Several school districts in this vicinity are still battling sex education curriculum problems. The combatants probably should go see Spring Awakening at Stray Dog. It’s a fine example of what adult unease over saying facts out loud can lead to.
Believing that adolescents won’t think about sex unless the adults bring it up is truly burying the head in the sand, and just as smothering. (I spent two years working in a facility for unwed mothers, and I could tell stories….) While the setting is in a 19th century German village, the young people beginning to wonder about the world outside, the rules of society and their own bodies could be almost anywhere.
It’s another tale of Back When rebellion with Right Now music, but don’t let that stop you. In fact, it adds considerable zest to a difficult, uncomfortable story. Director Justin Been and his team give us faint echoes of The Sound of Music gone awry. Robert M. Kapeller’s scenic design and Eileen Engel’s costumes make us understand this looks like a pretty normal world. (Those anti-embolic stockings on the young women in the cast stay up nicely, but they reminded this retired nurse of another setting. The dresses they wear are inauthentically short, but that’s artistic license.)
A gaggle of girls and a batch of boys – none, of course, in classrooms with the opposite gender – are the focus of the evening. All the adults are played by two actors, traditional with the show but confusing given the lack of a cast list, just photo-bios. Wendla (Allison Arana) is trying on a new dress when the play opens; her mother (Jan Niehoff, one of the adult multi-players) is disapproving. They’re going the next day to Wendla’s sister, who’s just had her second child. How, asks Wendla, does that happen? And mother blows it. She tries but just can’t use any more specific words than “love”.
Meanwhile in a classroom, the boys are being drilled about translating Virgil, the Roman poet. Moritz (Stephen Henley) is, well, snoozing when the master (Ben Ritchie, the other multi-tasking actor) calls on him, discovers the truth and begins to berate him. Moritz’ pal Melchior (Riley Dunn) tries to distract the master, and even takes up for Moritz, but this infuriates the master even more and he smacks Melchior with his pointer.
After class is over, Moritz explains he’s not sleeping well, so much homework and then his body is doing the strangest things that he doesn’t understand. Melchior knows what’s happening and tries to tell him, but pretty much gets fingers-in-the-ears for his effort. Moritz says he could probably bear to read something about it, though. Melchior, always ahead of his classmates, politically as well as socially, complies the next day with a little illustrated booklet he’s
created.
Things don’t stay this innocent. One of Wendela’s friends is being abused by her father, Moritz is heavily pressured by his parents to make his grades better, two other boys are enamored of each other, and another girl, Ilse (Dawn Schmidt), who seems always on the edge of things, has been disowned by her parents and lives in an artists colony, where some rather disturbing things are happening.
Hormones are rising, the whole identity-separation thing is going on, and the adults are more or less playing whack-a-mole trying to keep things under control. Fat chance.
Arana, as Wendela, in her SDT debut, is more than believable and sounds just right, intrigued but apprehensive, like A Good Girl. Dunn’s Melchior does not seem as adolescent as he chronologically is supposed to be, but mostly carries the intellectual battles off pretty well. It’s harder to tell exactly why he loses his temper at one point, though. One can’t help wanting to give Henley, as Moritz, a nice bowl of chicken soup and send him off for a nap, or at least some privacy. He’s a charmer.
The language is clearly X-rated, both spoken and sung, so perhaps the folks worrying that abstinence-only will be peeled away from their school curriculum should be forewarned. I enjoyed Sam Gaitsch’s choreography, particularly in some of the really feisty numbers like “The Bitch of Living”.
After I left opening night, I was on the phone with an old friend raised in South St. Louis but now decades removed. I remarked that I was passing the water tower on South Grand. “Boy, do I remember that. It was the first place I ever saw a woman’s breast. I was 13.” That scandalous statue, of course. It’s always a struggle.
Spring Awakening is another show that isn’t for the whole family. But nevertheless, it’s very worthwhile and a reminder that kids deserve the whole truth about this stuff.
Spring Awakening
through October 21
Stray Dog Theatre
Tower Grove Abbey
2336 Tennessee
314-865-1005
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