'Spring' brings messages on adolescence

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Advocate arts writer
• Published: Mar 15, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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They sit together on the playground, spring’s sun as bright as life’s beginning.

At 14, maybe 15, Melchior and Moritz are just awakening to life’s possibilities, its opportunities, its secrets.

Ah, the secrets. Melchior is curious. He wants to know things, things his parents won’t explain. Moritz is curious, too, but Melchior elevates his inquisitiveness to a higher level.

That’s when the sun doesn’t seem so bright, when the rusty pieces of metal are more prevalent than the swing sets. When innocence gives way to ruination.

And audiences realize how some things haven’t changed since 1891, when playwright Frank Wederkind wrote Spring Awakening. LSU Theatre will stage Jonathan Franzen’s 2007 translation of the play beginning Wednesday, March 18, in Hatcher Hall Theatre.

The play is part of the theatre department’s Main Stage series. It’s the series’ final production, in fact, to be staged in Hatcher Hall.

“We’ll be moving back to the Shaver Theatre in the Music and Dramatic Arts Building after this,” Joanna Battles said.
She’s the play’s director.

“That building will be reopening in June,” she continued. “But Hatcher Hall is really a great place. It’s intimate, and the audience has a chance to be close to the story. But this space will be turned into something else after we move back to the music building.”

Which may provide even more incentive for audiences to explore Wederkind’s story, because Battles is right. The Hatcher Hall Theatre is small, built in the round. The floor serves as the stage, which has been transformed into a combination playground and shipyard for this production.

Which seems to contradict the title, Spring Awakening. The set actually is a commentary on what’s about to happen, beginning with childhood on the swing and ending as bent and rusted in adulthood as the discarded shipyard pieces.

“And this play conveys some important things, especially the importance of communication,” Garrett Smith said. “The adults in this play don’t talk to their children about things, especially when it comes to sex. And when they do, they aren’t clear. So the children are curious.”

Smith is one of those children. Well, his character is one of the kids, 14-year-old Melchior.

Smith is 21, a junior theater major from Baton Rouge. So, he’s only seven years removed from his 14-year-old character. But five years, in this case, is a world apart.