Awaken and Sing

How Wedekind’s kindetragödie found its voice in a new century

By Steven Sater

When we were young Frank Wedekind was the Masked Man of our Spring Awakening.... This was the turn of the century. Bourgeois ideas lay in their agony.
—Berthold Viertel (1885-1953), Writings on Theatre

Suffice it to say, by the time I thought of introducing Wedekind's Masked Man to the American musical theatre, those same "bourgeois ideas" had more than managed to rise again.

Related Links: Spring Awakening by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik (TCG Books) The Outside Man an interview with Duncan Sheik by Nicole Estvanik (American Theatre) Creating and Producing the New American Musical a panel discussion including Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik (TCG National Conference) TRANSCRIPT COMING SOON

It was indeed the turn of a new century when I first gave Duncan Sheik a copy of the play. Some months later, in the wake of the shootings at Columbine, its subject felt all the more urgent; I approached director Michael Mayer about working on it with us.

These days, a short eight years later, in the shadow of the shootings at Virginia Tech, I am often asked why I ever thought Spring Awakening could work as a musical. And my only real answer is that I knew and loved the play, that I had long felt it was a sort of opera-in-waiting, and that somehow I could already "hear" Duncan's music in it.

Subtitled "A Children's Tragedy," Wedekind's play is full of the unheard, anguished cries of young people. It struck me that pop music—rock music—is the exact place that adolescents for the last few generations have found release from, and expression of, that same mute pain.

"The flesh has its own spirit," Wedekind once wrote. And surely his gorgeous threnody already has the soul of song within it. But I never dreamed that, by letting his characters actually sing, we would end up so profoundly transforming his work.

Then, perhaps there is something in the nature of song itself that opens the door to story—that admits us to the heart of the singer—as if every song tells of a sort of unacknowledged "I want." For what we sing is what is unspoken, what is hidden. The "real story."

As we began work, I vowed to remain true to Wedekind's fierce original intent. But I soon found that once we had access, through song, to the inner workings of our characters' hearts and minds, we engaged with them differently—we embarked on journeys with them. Before long, we found ourselves altering the structure, even the substance, of our source material, to account for the places those songs had taken us.

From the start, my thought was that the songs in our show would function as interior monologues. Characters would not serenade one another in the middle of scenes. Rather, each student would give voice to his or her inner landscape.

Surely, the original play is full of exquisite monologues—a dramatic technique Wedekind inherited from his countrymen Goethe and Schiller. But our monologues were meant to be truly interior—a technique more familiar in 20th-century fiction.

Instinctively, I felt I did not want to write lyrics that would forward the plot, and so chose not to follow that golden rule of musicals. I wanted a sharp and clear distinction between the world of the spoken and the world of the sung. And yet, I also wanted to create a seamless and ongoing musical counterpoint between the languages of those distinct worlds.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote: "What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence." And, yet, song seems to let us pause within that silence, to find ourselves articulate within it.

Within our show, the songs soon came to function as subtext. The boy and girl fumble to make polite conversation; but underneath, each of them already senses the enormous story about to unfold between them: "O, I'm gonna be wounded…."

We wrote songs as confession ("There is a part I can't tell, about the dark I know well"). Songs as denial ("Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh…well, fine") or admission ("It's the bitch of living as someone you can't stand"). Songs as cri de coeur ("But there's nowhere to hide from the ghost in my mind…."). Somehow, I felt, we still remained true to that inchoate yearning of Wedekind's youths.

But of course we were also up to something else: In our show, the scenes set out the world of 19th-century repression, while the songs afford our young characters a momentary release into contemporary pop idiom. (Caught in the relentless dramas of our adolescent lives, we are all still rock stars in the privacy of our own bedrooms.) The time-jumping structure of our show is meant, thus, to underscore the sadly enduring relevance of our theme.

Some of my earliest efforts to transpose 19th-century yearnings into contemporary attitudes and idiom were fairly straightforward. A failure at school, a virtual pariah at home, stymied in his efforts to flee provincial Bavaria, Wedekind's Moritz wanders to the river at dusk and declares: "But then, it's better this way.… I don't want to cry again—not today…." Our Moritz wanders into the same dusk, but soon ignites into neon—a post-punk kid at a mike who sings: "Awful sweet to be a little butterfly.… 'Cause, you know, I don't do sadness…."

Certainly, my original vow was to remain true to Wedekind's text. Still, I have been alternately touched and bemused that so many critics have spoken so highly about how faithful we have been to the original, how admirably we have distilled it. Maybe. But, at the same time, we have fundamentally altered it. (I remember when Stephen Spinella, who joined our show just before our Broadway transfer, asked to see my uncut translation from Wedekind of several of his scenes. I had nothing to show him. He continued to press his suit: He really wanted to see Moritz's scene with his father in its longer form—a scene in which the man humiliates, strikes and effectively renounces his son. Alas, I had to report that we never see Moritz with his father in the original play.)

Still, it has been more than merely adding new scenes, or thoroughly rewriting those already extant. We have created journeys for our three lead characters which do not exist in the original dark, fractious fable.

As others have noted, the two biggest shifts we made to the tale occur at the ends of Act 1 and Act 2—in the hayloft and then in the graveyard. In Wedekind's script, Melchior "date-rapes" Wendla. We wanted to see him make love to her. More: We wanted to show how this young man (who jests at his friend's puberty wounds) first uncovers ineluctable sexual feelings; how he begins to own his sexual identity; how he helps Wendla awaken to hers. The truth is, we had already, irrevocably, set Melchior on this path when we gave him the song "Touch Me." There, he articulates his sense of "the female" yearning for pleasure, singing as if in some hypothetical woman's voice: "Touch me, just like that. Now, there, that's it—God, that's heaven…." Sheltered in a hayloft in a rainstorm with an actual young woman—Wendla—and confronted with the possibility of giving her that pleasure, Melchior cannot restrain himself.

As for the graveyard…suffice it to say, after seven years' labor, we finally dispensed with the notorious Masked Man. This Symbolist figure appears—literally out of nowhere—in the last scene of Wedekind's text. He confronts the despairing Melchior and assures him that with a warm meal in his belly, he will no longer chafe to join his friend Moritz in the grave.

Without a doubt, this character is a sort of throwback, a deus ex machina, like those in Ancient Greek tragedies who appear in the final scene to resolve the issues of the play. And yet, his appearance, along with the ghost of Moritz, who rises from his grave to tempt Melchior to suicide, effectively marks the birth of the Expressionist Theatre (a world where iconic figures body forth the emotions of the central characters).

Since high school—when I first read the play—I have been haunted by the Masked Man. I struggled so long to incorporate him into our show, offering him up in one incarnation after another: as a sort of somber emcee, as an ever-present silent specter, as an actor who (living or dead) somehow survived the Allied bombing of a German theatre. But we finally realized that within our piece the music already performs the role of the Masked Man, for it gives our adolescent characters a voice to celebrate, to decry, to embrace the darker longings within them as part of them, rather than as something to run from or repress.

As for Moritz arising from his grave to tell Melchior how good the dead have it, hovering high above joy and despair…it just seemed wrong to us—a cop-out, for dramaturgic effect, on a character we cared about and had worked so hard to illuminate. In our show, we witness Moritz's struggles at school and home firsthand; his devotion to Melchior is his sole anchor. In song after song, he utters heartfelt, would-be defiant cries of anguish at the world grown dark around him. In the Expressionist original, the Moritz we meet in the graveyard is largely an aspect of Melchior's feeling—a projection. But for us, he was still our gangly Eraserhead. We didn't want to see him extend a rotting hand in an effort to betray his friend.

And yet, it felt appropriate to hear from him again, and also from Wendla. The question was: What did we want to say? If the answer wasn't a "warm meal" in a young Bavarian belly, then how was Melchior to find the strength to go on? Ultimately, the lyrics—the message—of Melchior's final song, "Those You've Known," came to me while writing it. I found the lyrics telling me: It was the love still felt for those we have known that enables us to continue in the face of losing them.

Now we had the end of our tale: a boy left thoroughly distraught, his rebellious spirit broken by The System, somehow finds sustenance at the source of his sufferings. He has learned to learn from his heart.

If the lesson to be learned was of the heart, then it made sense that we would introduce Melchior as a guy with a naive rebellious pride in the power of his own mind. And so (working backward from that lesson learned by show's end), we wrote his opening number, "All That's Known":

All they say
Is "Trust in What Is Written."
Wars are made,
And somehow that is wisdom.

Thought is suspect,
And money is their idol,
And nothing is okay unless it's scripted in their Bible.

But I know
There's so much more to find—
Just in looking through myself, and not at them.

Still, I know
To trust my own true mind,
And to say: "There's a way through this...."

The realization of how our story should begin led us to construct an entirely new opening scene for our young rebel—the Latin Class—which does not exist in the original. This scene allowed us to see the boys in school. It allowed us to introduce a world of repression, where students are struck for giving the wrong answers. It let us see Moritz floundering. Most important, it showed us Melchior standing up for his friend and defending him.

In contrast, we were clear from the beginning about how to launch Wendla's story, and "Mama Who Bore Me" was one of the first songs Duncan and I wrote. I always felt our show should begin with this determined young woman asking her mother how babies are born, only to be rebuffed, coddled with bourgeois evasion.

In the original, this classic scene falls in Act 2. Wendla has already met Melchior, has indeed already been beaten by him. Moving the scene to the top of the show allowed us to make a political point right from the start: The seeds of the entire "children's tragedy" are sown by this one willful act of silence—a parent failing to talk honestly to her child about sex.

I saw Wendla as a girl with a mission—a 19th-century teen with a quest that could also feel contemporary. Thwarted by her mother, she keeps looking for answers: She wants to know the world of her strange new body. Disturbed but also darkly intrigued to learn Martha's father beats her, Wendla turns, searchingly, to Melchior. In the original script, when she asks him to beat her, he is dumbstruck; all she can offer is that she has never been beaten, her entire life. When our Wendla asks Melchior to beat her, he demands: "How can you even want such a thing?" And she responds: "I've never felt…anything."

As Wedekind scripted it, the hayloft scene is brief—startlingly brief. With next to no acknowledgment of the horrific beating Melchior has inflicted on her, Wendla kneels beside him in the hay, and he begins kissing her. A moment later, he forces himself on her. We worked hard to flesh out a fuller scene between them, to let our would-be lovers struggle to make sense of what they have so brutally done—to offer one another forgiveness, before they fall into each other's arms.

From the top of Act 2, we wanted to see Wendla confusedly awakening to her own womanhood, owning her lovemaking, claiming her part of the pleasure. Where Wedekind gives her an Ophelia-like morning after, our young heroine celebrates in song the sweet unknown world she's just discovered. The final arc of her journey, however, came late in the process. Our producer Tom Hulce felt, and repeatedly warned, that we were letting our sometime-fearless young woman conclude her story as a "victim," lamenting the incomprehensible news that she was with child. The problem was, we all loved her sad song, "Whispering." One day, Michael proposed we try intercutting that song with the scene between Melchior's parents that follows it. As Wendla discovers the consequences of her night with Melchior, the more progressive Gabors, hearing the same news, give up on their son and send him to a reformatory.

It was an inspired idea. Somehow, in cutting those scenes together, it became plain that, over the course of her song, Wendla could undergo a transformation. Her song would then play in counterpoint with their scene: as Frau Gabor bows to her sense of duty and condemns Melchior, Wendla sets aside her grief and trusts what her heart found with him. And so I rewrote the words of "Whispering"—what had been, from near the beginning, my favorite lyric:

See the sweetheart on his knees,
So faithful and adoring.
Says he loves her,
So she lets him have her—
Another summer's story....

As the story of the song changed, this chorus became:

Had a sweetheart on his knees,
So faithful and adoring.
And he touched me,
And I let him love me.
So, let that be my story.…

While Moritz finally succumbs to the humiliations of society (he can no longer face the prospect of a world that brooks no failure), our Wendla chooses to remember the love she has felt, to ignore the ghostly whispers of society, and embrace the new life already whispering within her.

And with that move, our play made its pro-choice stance explicit. Wendla's abortion was, in a sense, transported into our own century: a century in which a "bourgeois idea" such as abstinence is still widely preached as the only form of safe sex; where the widespread dissemination of contraceptive devices is described by some within our Department of Health and Human Services as demeaning to women. One can only hope that a century from now the world will finally hear, and honestly answer, the cries of its Wendlas.

And so I am left pondering how and why all this ever came to be. I remember the first time I walked by our marquee, feeling almost baffled: "Spring Awakening—A Musical? Wait, no, isn't that just the name of a book in my room?"

I can honestly say that my earliest sense of why this kindertragödie could work as a piece of musical theatre was instinctual. Even so, the entire eight-year siege of developing it entailed nothing harder than learning to trust our instincts. As Michael has recently said, we didn't set out to "revolutionize the musical theatre," nor with the express intention of doing something different. Rather, we had a story we wanted to tell, and a way we all felt we wanted to tell it.

Through all those years, through the darkest hours when our project fell off almost everyone's radar, Michael never lost heart, never lost faith in our ability to pull the thing together. For all the endless nights he spent going through line after line, every syllable of this text with me…well, this text—the show itself—are all I have to repay that.

As for the debt to Duncan…who can explain the mystic thing that happens when I hand him a lyric and he somehow hears a song in it. When (in a moment indelibly etched in my memory) he first looks through those words, picks up his guitar and strums: "There's a moment you know...." And then he pauses, looks up with a grin, and sings: "You're fucked."

This article appears as the introduction to the text of the musical Spring Awakening, published by TCG Books.

Playwright Steven Sater wrote the book and lyrics of Spring Awakening, now running on Broadway. He has also collaborated with Duncan Sheik on the musical plays Nero (Another Golden Rome) and The Nightingale.