Staged Reading Presents Controversial Play
Baldwin Hall Auditorium will be the site for a staged reading of “Spring Awakening,” starting at 2 p.m. March 22.
First performed under heavy censorship in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind’s play “Spring Awakening,” closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid public outrage and charges of obscenity.
The play’s content was radical indeed, touching on teenage sex, suicide, abortion, masturbation and sadomasochism, but even more radical was the unsentimental and brutally authentic comedy with which Wedekind treated it.
The story traces the dawning sexual awareness of four teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, Wendla and Hansy, who, in their painfully funny contradictions (they are at once too innocent and not remotely innocent at all), remain fresh and unsettling, even in our own sex-saturated culture.
Staged Reading is a new course created under the theatre department’s Advanced Studies and Projects. It is intended to improve student’s work in a performance style that is being used more frequently. For more information, contact Smith or College of Arts and Sciences Secretary Diane Moore at 785.4417.
First performed under heavy censorship in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind’s play “Spring Awakening,” closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid public outrage and charges of obscenity.
The play’s content was radical indeed, touching on teenage sex, suicide, abortion, masturbation and sadomasochism, but even more radical was the unsentimental and brutally authentic comedy with which Wedekind treated it.
The story traces the dawning sexual awareness of four teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, Wendla and Hansy, who, in their painfully funny contradictions (they are at once too innocent and not remotely innocent at all), remain fresh and unsettling, even in our own sex-saturated culture.
Staged Reading is a new course created under the theatre department’s Advanced Studies and Projects. It is intended to improve student’s work in a performance style that is being used more frequently. For more information, contact Smith or College of Arts and Sciences Secretary Diane Moore at 785.4417.
