FRÜHLINGS ERWACHEN

(Spring's Awakening) byBenjamin Franklin Wedekind.

Premiered 1906. Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality was considered unperformably obscene for years after he wrote it in 1890-1891, yet it became one ofMaxReinhardt's biggest hits of the 1906-1907 season when the director premiered it at theDeutsches Theater. Indeed it was performed more often during that season than any other play in the Deutsches repertoire. It features on-stage masturbation and sadomasochism, discussions of copulation, and the death of the leading female character by abortion. Its principal character is 15-year-old Melchior Gabor, whose relationships with fellow students end in catastrophe. His attempts to enlighten his friend Moritz Stiefel about the biological facts of human reproduction end in Moritz's suicide — though Moritz comes back in the play's final scene with his severe, self-inflicted head wound on full display. Melchior impregnates the 14-year-old Wendla Bergmann, much to the shame of her hysterical mother; the mother arranges for a doctor to perform an abortion on Wendla, but she dies in the process. Another schoolgirl becomes a prostitute, and a schoolboy finds onanistic pleasure in reading Shakespeare'sOthelloaloud. In the aforementioned final scene, Wedekind abandons the heretofore realistic depiction of the action and opts for caricature: Moritz confronts Melchior in a village cemetery and tries to convince his friend to join him in suicide; then a mysterious "Man in the Mask" (often played by Wedekind himself in productions of the play after Rein-hardt's premiere) appears to persuade Melchior, successfully as it turns out, to choose life.