The Awakening of Spring

by Frank Wedekind from 1891

About

Wedekind's 1891 play — banned in Germany until 1906 — is a portrait of adolescent sexuality and its destruction by adult repression: a series of vignettes following teenage boys and girls through sexual discovery, pregnancy, abortion, and suicide in a bourgeois German town. The play was far ahead of its time in treating adolescent sexuality as a real and serious subject rather than a scandal to be suppressed. Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik adapted it into the musical Spring Awakening (2006). In its original form it remains one of the most formally inventive and emotionally uncompromising plays of the pre-war period — a founding text of expressionist drama.

Translated from the original German.

Tragedy Expressionist Fin de Siècle Dark Intense Unsettlingen

The Awakening of Spring

Characters: 39
Words: 15k
Acts: 3
Scenes: 5
Duration: ~1 hr 53 min

Characters

#CharacterPlayerLines

1

MELCHIOR

—

149

2

MORITZ

—

114

3

WENDLA

—

109

4

FRAU BERGMANN

—

49

5

MARTHA

—

35

6

ILSE

—

33

7

SONNENSTICH

—

29

8

FRAU GABOR

—

26

17 sections

15k words

#TitleWords

Act I

1

Act I Scene FIRST.

3622:43

2

Act I Scene SECOND.

1.6k12:05

3

Act I Scene THIRD.

9457:05

4

Act I Scene FOURTH.

5864:24

5

Act I Scene FIFTH.

1.1k8:04

Act II

6

Act II Scene FIRST.

1.5k11:02

7

Act II Scene SECOND.

9086:49

8

Act II Scene THIRD.

4483:22

9

Scene SIXTH.

530:24

10

Scene SEVEN.

1.1k8:33

Act III

11

Act III Scene FIRST.

1.1k8:36

12

Act III Scene SECOND.

7835:52

13

Act III Scene THIRD.

1.4k10:39

14

Act III Scene FOURTH.

4093:04

15

Scene FIFTH.

8906:41

16

Scene SIXTH.

4653:29

17

Scene SEVENTH.

1.3k10:00

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