As Spring Awakening gets closer and Tech Week starts soon, I've been wrapping up my brief stint as dramaturg. (If you don't know what that is, that's okay. Wikipedia is helpful.) The final thing I needed to do was create a brief historical introduction to the show.
Spring Awakening
was adapted from a play by the same name written by the German playwright Frank
Wedekind in 1891. Wedekind (1864-1918) led a storied life, having an affair and
an illegitimate child and also working in the circus. He eventually entered the
theater and became known for his satirical writings and performances. He served
a nine-month prison term for “assaulting the dignity of the monarch.” The play
wasn’t performed until 1906 and was banned or censored for indecent and
subversive subject matter. It was first staged in English in New York City in
1917, but the Commissioner of Licenses claimed that the play was pornographic. It
was only allowed one performance. The musical adaptation appeared off-Broadway
in 2006 and subsequently moved to Broadway where is won 8 Tony Awards,
including Best Musical. It was adapted for television in 2008 and there is
currently a movie adaptation being produced. Spring Awakening has been immensely popular since it’s premiere,
especially among teenagers and college students.
Taking place in a rural town in Imperial Germany during
the early 1890’s, Spring Awakening is
grounded in the culture of its time. School dominated the life of middle class
boys during this period. The Gymnasium, a secondary school focused on the study
of classical languages, was designed to prepare pupils for university entrance
exams. Upon graduation they have the opportunity to apply for spaces at
universities. Instruction was heavily dependent on memorization and public
recitation and teachers were fully empowered to use corporal punishment in
their classrooms. Secondary schools were exclusively for boys until the end of
the century, when girls were granted some limited access to it. However,
schools were strictly sex-segregated after elementary school.
Any discussion of sexuality was strictly forbidden by the
moral code of the day. Sex outside marriage was taboo, especially for women.
The religious values of the day stressed prudence and temperance and the value
of family honor. Premarital sex was considered a smear on that honor. However,
it was far more common than the literature of the day let on. Because parents
did not discuss such matters with their children, it was quite common for them
to have to deal with a pregnancy on their own. Abortion was still illegal
across Europe, so any procedures would have been performed by someone without
formal medical training. The mortality rate for such procedures was very high.
At the same time
that religion was more strictly enforcing standards of morality, people were
falling away from organized religion. Church attendance fell sharply and many
younger people felt increasingly distant from the faith of their parents. There
was a feeling that the spiritual emptiness was a new phenomenon, and as such
was vilified by traditionalists and conservatives. Friedrich Nietzsche, a
publically avowed atheist, wrote of this time, “God is dead. God remains dead.
And we have killed him.”
