SPRING AWAKENING

by Frank Wedekind
(Adapted by Jonathan Franzen) 

University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA
February, 2014

A production of Jonathan Franzen’s translation of Frank Wedekind’s play, imagined within a deteriorating playground. The piece utilized no realistic scenery. Instead, the set’s playground equipment was used transformatively to suggest shifts in location. The tires that stuck out from within a sandbox transformed from having actors sit on them to suggest that they were stools in a classroom to having flowers laid upon them to suggest that they were graves in a cemetery. A seesaw was transformed from being the evocative location for a power struggle between Mr. and Mrs. Gabor to the bed upon which Wendla laid when a Doctor discovered she was pregnant. A metal jungle gym went from being the structure on which the children played in Act 1 to being the cage that Melchior and the other boys at the reformatory were trapped in in Act 2. Utilizing a playground environment to suggest colder, adult spaces underscored the loss of innocence at the heart of the play. This was further conveyed through the recurring device of balloons being used transformatively. A balloon floated over the audience banks delivering Mrs. Gabor’s letter to Moritz. Another was stomped upon by Moritz as he held a gun to his head, providing the sound of the gunshot in the moment of his suicide. Another floated through the air as it deflated as Melchior learned of the unsafe abortion which ended Wendla’s life.