Spring Awakening
A Play
ISBN10: 086547978X
ISBN13: 9780865479784
Trade Paperback
112 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
First performed in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's controversial play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid charges of obscenity and public outrage. For the better part of the twentieth century, Wedekind's intense body of work was largely unpublished and rarely performed. Yet the play's subject matter—teenage desire, suicide, abortion, and homosexuality—is as explosive and important today as it was a century ago. Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.
Today, one hundred years after the play's first performance, a new musical version of this essential modern masterpiece is being hailed as the "best new musical . . . in a generation" (John Heilpern, The New York Observer). Franzen's translation of the text—for so long poorly served in English—is unique in capturing the bizarre and inimitable comic spirit that animates almost every line of this tragic play.
Reviews
Praise for Spring Awakening
"Spring Awakening is the best play ever written about teenagers, and Jonathan Franzen's fraught yet buoyant translation is the best I've ever read. In a culture where lies about adolescence prevail, this funny and honest play is more relevant than ever. Spring Awakening is essential reading."—Christopher Shinn, The New School
"In the introduction to his new translation, Franzen offers good insights into Wedekind's text and also provides a thoroughly damning critique of Sater's musical, essentially illustrating that the soul of the original is lost. And he's right."—Justin Maxwell, Rain Taxi