Spring Awakening

Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality is as disturbing today as when it was first produced. "Spring Awakening "was written in 1891 but had to wait the greater part of a century before it received its first complete performance in Britain, at the National Theatre in 1974. The production was highly praised, much of its strength deriving from this translation by Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond Pable. For this edition the translator, Edward Bond, has written a note on the play and a factual introduction to Wedekind's life and work. Frank Wedekind, born July 24, 1864, was a German actor and playwright. He lived in Switzerland (1872-84) and then in Munich, where he worked at various jobs, including journalist and cabaret performer. He wrote plays from 1891, when his tragedy "The Awakening of Spring" created a scandal with its theme of awakening adolescent sexuality. In his "Lulu" cycle, "Earth Spirit" (1895) and "Pandora's Box" (1904), he extended the theme of sex to the underworld of society and introduced the amoral Lulu. His plays used episodic scenes, fragmented dialogue, distortion, and caricature, prefiguring the Theatre of the Absurd and forming a transition from realism to Expressionism. Wedekind's play about adolescent sexuality is as disturbing today as when it was first produced. "Spring Awakening "was written in 1891 but had to wait the greater part of a century before it received its first complete performance in Britain, at the National Theatre in 1974. The production was highly praised, much of its strength deriving from this translation by Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond Pable. For this edition the translator, Edward Bond, has written a note on the play and a factual introduction to Wedekind's life and work. "Scrupulously faithful both to Wedekind's irony and his poetry."--"The Times of London"