STAGE REVIEWS : An Americanized ‘Spring Awakening’

Frank Wedekind, the man who turned German and European theater upside down when he wrote his scandalous “Spring Awakening” in 1890, nearly missed being born in Oakland. His parents lived in the Bay Area for some years, then moved back to Germany before their enfant terrible burst into the world.

This biographical oddity crops up now that director Michael David Fox’s adaptation of “Spring/Awakening” has opened at the Flight Theatre in Hollywood (the addition of a slash in the title is its own oddity). What if Wedekind had been raised here, instead of there? Would he have written an American view of disenchanted, alienated youth? What would it have looked like?

Fox’s version is perhaps the closest we’ll ever get to a rough idea. We’re not in Wedekind’s fin de siecle era, though: Fox has updated the tragedy to present-day suburbia. Instead of Teutonic teens meandering amid the farmlands, these are adolescents skateboarding between 7-Eleven stores.

The transferal is a natural idea, but that doesn’t mean that it’s naturally easy. The strain of adaptation sometimes shows at the Flight, both when Fox is too faithful (Wedekind’s 14-year-old girl Wendla might have just gotten over believing in the stork in the 1890s, but would Wendy in the 1990s?) and when he takes license (the neighborhood sexpot now talks about partying with Madonna and the Sex Pistols, which is chronologically impossible).

It’s also hard to gauge where we are from time to time. Though Fox has chosen a cast that accents American behavior, he retained most of the original character names. When was the last time you ran across a bunch of kids named Hannah, Thea, Ilse and Jason Lammermeir?

But Fox has also chosen a cast that, for the most part, knows where things are situated emotionally. As a girl turned inside out by her mother’s inability to give her straight talk about sex, Stacey Cortez’s Wendy exudes a tortured yet innocent aimlessness, stumbling right into the arms of Matthew (John McCabe).

McCabe has a harder time finding the basis for Matthew’s erratic mood swings (hormones? existential rebellion?), but Allen Moon’s suicidal Martin is the very model of the self-consumed Wedekind hero.

The actors have nothing but themselves and the text to depend on, playing out this “Spring Awakening” on a bare stage in tiny pools of light. The ultra-austere approach may be a case of focusing on the essentials, or just a case of next to no money (Michael Arabian’s stunning 1989 Odyssey production, by contrast, was an Expressionist tapestry).

The essentials do come through, along with the sense that “Spring Awakening” is still the newest 100-year-old play in existence.