Liz Sager's Spring Awakening

The cream rises to the top, and Liz Sager’s production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in the Staller Center Cabaret is an excellent showcase for some of the best acting talent the Theatre Department at SBU has to offer. Caitlin Bartow and Eric Michael Klouda stole the show as Melchior and Moritz, respectively. Bartow was especially engaging with her adolescent boy bluster, and brought a good deal of depth to her character. From pretending to know more about sex than he did, to freaking out when Wendla (Molly Walsh Warren) had him beat her, to insisting on taking himself seriously in the graveyard, Bartow’s Melchior was the star of the play. Klouda (although he was a little hard to understand at first due to diction and delivering his lines at the floor) was the perfect opposite and scene partner to Bartow. Nervous and high-strung, he created a convincing character arch that culminated in a theatric tour de force in his suicide scene. They were perfectly cast as the two male points in the core Spring Awakening triangle. Unfortunately, I found the third point Wendla wanting. Warren seemed unable to deliver much beyond sighing innocence. She almost broke through into something incredible in the scene when she gets Moritz to beat her, and I was on the edge of my seat waiting for her to commit and meet Bartow’s energy, but she never did. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast was also split between those who owned the stage and those who seemed tentative, sometimes to the point where I thought they were grasping for their lines. I hate to say it, because it seems like Sager has been working hard on this for the past six weeks, but it read as under-rehearsed.

I would like to say a word about Sager’s directorial concept – this is her Spring Awakening and MFA project after all. From her program note, she is obviously interested in deconstructing the gender binary, and she approached this with gender-blind casting and costuming. The casting worked in part, and didn’t work in part. In a cast of twelve, she had nine women and three men. This meant that the preponderance of male parts was played by women, which audiences are used to in academic theater where we have more women than men. From the other direction, both Andrew Breslin and Chris Petty played women during the course of play. Breslin can be taken seriously as a concerned mother, and this is not the first time he’s been cast as such. It’s hard, though, to take the heavily bearded Petty seriously as a giddy school-girl. That choice seemed forced and heavy handed, as did Herr Gabor (again played by Petty) undressing Frau Gabor (Becky Goldberg) from her men’s clothing and re-dressing her as a woman when they decided to send the recalcitrant Melchior to reform school.

I left the theater feeling that a good idea was undermined by being under-resourced. With such a large dramatis personae, it seems that Sager was forced to cast actors who couldn’t meet Bartow and Klouda’s (among others) energy, and to cast a preponderance of women which I feel undermined the point of her gender-blind casting. And that's not even mentioning that a dozen actors is a lot of people to coordinate! Even half that would have been a handful. I left wishing that instead of attempting to do a translation of Wedekind’s entire play and super-impose a critique of the gender binary on it, Sager had instead adapted Spring Awakening to focus on those parts of Wedekind's story that best supported her critique.

Spring Awakening plays tonight (March 10^th) at 8PM and tomorrow (March 11^th) at 2PM in the Staller Center Cabaret. Last night was a full house, so reservations are recommended: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/events/284882374915297/