'Spring Awakening' Goes Back to Its Roots

“Totally Fucked” and “Mama Who Bore Me.” These are the songs of teenage angst, from a musical that made Broadway seem more modern to a millennium generation that had previously written it off: “Spring Awakening.”

But Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club’s current production of “Spring Awakening” is the play, not the musical many are familiar with. The play is filled with themes of isolation and repression, and the ending is far from the relatively uplifting conclusions typical of the musical. When they decided to focus on the original play, director kat baus ’15 ran into a problem. Baus couldn’t find an English translation that did the text justice.

So baus set about translating the play from German. The German text left a lot of room for interpretation for the director—there are hardly any stage directions, and many of the sensitive topics, from rape to masturbation, are represented by a mere line of dashes in the script. “Getting to play with the language, to bring [the storyline] through in a contemporary context…has been such a blast,” baus says.

They found references to Nietzsche and the Bible not present in the Broadway iteration. The presence of these influences added depth to the play for baus, allowing them to re-interpret a storyline in a way that hasn’t been readily presented on the modern stage. “You feel like adolescents are actually speaking,” producer Joshua D. Blecher-Cohen ’16 says.

“Spring Awakening” is the 1891 story of a group of young adults struggling with their sexuality identity in a rural German town. For the HRDC production, “Spring Awakening” is set in a town in the American South, in an effort to make the play more relatable and relevant to today.

Most of the 10 actors in the cast play multiple roles—a teen and an adult. This choice is not only about efficiency but also about layering the complexity of the characters. Actor Colin A. Mark ’17, who plays Moritz, sees the play as one of the most difficult in which he’s been cast, but also one of the most rewarding. “We have been putting in place a lot of measures to make sure that the actors are able to stay safe while engaging in this kind of difficult work,” Mark says.

“Spring Awakening,” which gives voice to the contemporary adolescent experience—and just how difficult and confusing it is—will be opening at the Loeb Experimental Theater on Nov. 14.