STAGE REVIEW : ‘Spring Awakening’ Portrays Sexual Terror of Adolescence

A brief description of the play “Spring Awakening” makes it sound like a teen exploitation movie.

“Spring Awakening” examines teen-agers, young teen-agers, as they discover sex. The characters masturbate and copulate. They try it with members of the same sex and of the opposite sex.

They also experiment with sado-masochism, get pregnant, get expelled from school, try to abort, die in the attempt, commit suicide, talk to headless ghosts. Not all of their problems are related to sex--they’re also depicted as victims of a rigid academic system that will make them slaves and give them nervous breakdowns.

But this isn’t a previously undiscovered first film of James Dean’s--or Molly Ringwald’s. It’s a century-old play by the German writer Frank Wedekind, and director Michael Arabian gives it a lively, imaginative staging at the Odyssey.

Arabian makes the theatrical nature of the event clear from the beginning. Before the play begins, the cast goes through warm-up exercises in front of the audience. Then they gather in a circle and chant. When they finally break for the first scene, the cast members who aren’t involved in it remain on stage and watch.

Later, in a scene that’s a monologue in the text, these extra actors virtually serve as a chorus line. They maneuver giant posts (part of a highly mobile set by Don Llewelyn and Saeed Hedjazi) in intricately choreographed patterns. This is all done to the accompaniment of Nathan Wang’s big, brooding score--which outgrows the term incidental music , though technically that’s what it is.

Some of the extra-textual trappings are excessive. It’s distracting when the on-stage onlookers laugh at lines that don’t elicit the same response from the real audience. And why do the girls in these scenes (but not the boys) wear black choir robes?

The length of the production, nearly three hours, is also excessive. Some of this is Wedekind’s responsibility--he included two scenes that haven’t anything to do with the central story. One of these scenes appears to exist simply so that homosexuality will be included among the catalogue of sexual variations on display, and Wedekind placed this scene at the one point in the play--just before the ending--where it does the most damage to the momentum of the story.

Still, we wouldn’t want Arabian to start deleting; this play was censored enough, thank you, in its early years. Furthermore, the communal rituals that Arabian added do convey a sense of the universality and timelessness of the adolescent Angst that we’re watching. They take “Spring Awakening” into the territory covered by “The Rite of Spring.”

Lest the production get carried away by all the artiness, Rick Foster’s translation--commissioned for this production--brings it back into the present day, using rough American teen vernacular. And Arabian supplements the contemporaneity--at least for the boys in the story--by letting them read skin magazines, listen to Led Zeppelin on a big portable radio and pass around a basketball.

In short, it’s a production about 19th-Century Germans and 20th-Century Americans at the same time (and therefore an apt choice for inclusion in the “Jugendstil Fest: Young Moderns of 1900,” of which this production is a part). Although Betty Berberian’s costumes remain more in the former era than the latter, everything else about the play jumps out of the last century and into our own.

The cast is generally able. As best friends Melchior and Moritz, Sean Six and Jon Mathews connect with each other yet also make it apparent why the boys’ roads diverged so radically--one toward death, one toward life. Mathews occasionally seems too mature and too mannered, but Lycia Naff is a breath of fresh air as the 14-year-old who learns too late of the inadequacy of the stork story.

One casting decision breeds some slight confusion: A Masked Man is played by a woman (Jillian McWhirter) who, behind her mask, looks too much like the loose girl Ilse (Lara Lyon). Generally, though, Lisa Cooperman’s masks sharpen the play’s satirical edge to just the right proportions, and Marianne Schneller’s lights add a touch of grandeur.

At 12111 Ohio Ave., Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 7 p.m., Jan. 29 and Feb. 12 matinees at 3 p.m., indefinitely. Tickets: $14.50-$18.50; (213) 826-1626.