ABOUT THE SHOW: 

Tim Cusack and Max Arnaud in Spring Awakening

Adhesive Theater Project presents a new production of Frank Wedekind's 1891 play Spring Awakening, in a new version by Ted Hughes. Spring Awakening tells a story of sexual awareness and repression among a group of teenagers. This production, directed by Cory Einbinder (Site Installation Theater Ensemble, Philadelphia) is inspired by the work of Edward Gorey. According to the press materials, "The play finds a perfect marriage of beauty and cruelty. The set, costumes, and actors are hand-painted in tribute to this American master we lost to us so recently. Seven actors plays 26 characters: children, adults, and monstrous teachers over seven feet tall."

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NYTHEATRE.COM REVIEW
by Martin Denton
September 23, 2000

Cory Einbinder's achievement in this production of Spring Awakening is nothing short of extraordinary. He's recast Wedekind's seminal symbolist tragedy as an expressionist morality play, setting it in a stark, perversely macabre universe of shadow and light, one that mirrors the dangerously repressed and hypocritical society that the play exposes. Stunningly theatrical, moodily evocative, and even a little scary at times, this Spring Awakening crackles with invention and intelligence. Einbinder is a director of exceeding promise; this show is going to be gone too soon (after just a two-week run!), so most of us will need to content ourselves with whatever he's planning to do next.

Einbinder's work also makes for a spectacular introduction to this play. Written in 1891, and first performed (in a heavily censored version) in 1905, Spring Awakening deals frankly and provokingly with the sexual awakening of a group of German adolescents. Only one of them, Melchior, seems to have a clear understanding of sex; his friend, the slightly backward Moritz, is too ashamed to even talk about it, and requires Melchior to write out a list of instructions for him rather than explain things face-to-face. Wendla, the pretty teenage girl that Melchior eventually makes love to, can't get her mother to tell her anything of the facts of life; and so when she becomes pregnant she remains ignorant of her situation. Another schoolmate, Hans Rilow, is so steeped in religious guilt over his sexual urges that his masturbation ritual resembles nothing so much as self-flagellation.

I don't want to give too much away if you don't know the play, so suffice to say that ignorance and parental disapproval and repression yield unhappy, even tragic, results for most of the characters. Only the appearance in the final moments of the play of a mysterious man who may be the Devil (but more likely is simply a living manifestation of man's free will) suggests that for at least some of Wedekind's troubled teens better times may lay ahead.

It's all rather potent, sensational stuff, even for today; one can only imagine how it must have been received in the Victorian era in which it was originally written. Einbinder helps us do exactly that, vividly, with a brooding decor inspired by the artist Edward Gorey (but, tellingly, lacking his playfulness). The photos at the top of the page give a hint, I hope, of the oppressive environment that Einbinder has provided for his young characters to grow up in; what's missing are the towering monsters that Einbinder makes of their parents and teachers, skulking colossi seven feet tall treading horribly and ominously through their charges' lives on gigantic boots that look and sound like cement blocks.

It's a gripping, compelling vision that generally illuminates Wedekind's themes. Even, as occasionally happens, when Einbinder's dazzling visual style feels at odds with the play, it never fails to arrest and disarm us.

Einbinder obviously doesn't achieve all of this on his own. Paata Uta Bekaia is credited with costumes (which are magnificent) and "additional art"; Joel Griffin is responsible for the indispensable soundscape which finds aural equivalents for Einbinder's phantasmagoric stage pictures.

The four principal characters are vividly and intelligently realized by Tim Cusack (Moritz), Max Arnaud (Melchior), Alanna Medlock (Wendla), and Grant Moninger (Hans), all of whom deftly balance childlike naiveté and adolescent angst with astonishing realism. Moninger's masturbation scene, in particular, ranks as tour de force: so painfully naked are the youngster's conflicted emotions evoked that we feel like voyeurs (though we hardly see anything at all: Einbinder and company are out to jolt our senses, not satisfy our prurience). Cusack gets a grand ghoulish moment in a graveyard in the play's final scene, as well; watch for it.

A program note tells us baldly that Spring Awakening is funded "out of the pocket of a day carpenter and his pitiful savings," which leads me to two conclusions. First, imagine what wonders Einbinder could accomplish with the bankroll he deserves. And second, imagine what passion and vision this young man must possess to have created so much with so little.