 "Photo: Mary Kan/The Daily Texan")
What: “Frulings Erwachen”
Where: Oscar G. Brockett Theatre
When: Today and Saturday at 8 p.m.
Admission: Free
Frank Wedekind’s “Fruhlings Erwachen” (“Spring Awakening”) has a history of provocation. Its first English-language performance in 1917 was almost shut down due to claims that the play was pornographic. A production in 1964 in England was forced to tone down its content. The point is, the play pushed buttons, and that inspired UT assistant Germanic studies professor Philip Broadbent to direct a new production.
“It’s a fine example of a theater piece that wants to jolt its audience — it wants to jolt it out of complacency,” he said.
The play centers around 14-year-old Melchior Gabor, played by kinesiology junior Bishan Jones, who feels isolated because he is much more knowledgeable about the world — especially about sex — than his peers. Another central conflict revolves around Gabor’s friend, Moritz Stiefel, played by German senior Chris Gomez, because he has difficulty coming to terms with puberty and new sexual knowledge.
Wedekind wrote the play as a critique of conservative German society and its desire to keep children innocent. According to Broadbent, the play is filled with Freudian elements.
“What it does is it uses Freud as a foil to show how society is deliberately manipulating its youth,” he said.
Jones said his early teenage experiences allow him to empathize with and understand his character.
“When I was about this age, 14, I felt like that because I was so curious about stuff,” Jones said. “I looked into it, and I felt like I didn’t really have people to talk about it with because they weren’t necessarily at the same level I was at.”
The play will be entirely performed in German. For the actors, this posed a great challenge, as not all of them are fluent in German.
“The language itself does pose a barrier, but it also poses an opportunity to get more in tune with language,” Gomez said.
It’s not just reciting lines in a different language that’s hard — it’s thinking in that language simultaneously.
“You’re processing things in one language, and you’re trying to spit them out in different language, and no pun intended, but things do get lost in translation,” Jones said.
Can “Fruhlings Erwachen” be understood and appreciated in modern times? Broadbent argues that it can, using the recent controversy of creationism in Texas schools as a parallel.
“Creationism is an attempt to deny other aspects of what’s happening in the world,” he said “You can think of for example Texas, [which has] the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the United States, and yet it’s so remarkable how little sex education there is in the state school system.”
Broadbent is also putting on “Fruhlings Erwachen” as an outreach activity for high school students to get interested in German. To combat the language barrier, a student acting as a director will interrupt the play three times and give a summary of what has happened so far in English.
“We’re going out of our way to invite high school students and teachers to come to the performance, and that’s why we made it free,” he said.
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