OnStage: Youth be served in 'Spring Awakening'

OK, adults, wrap your lame brains around this: Frances Koncan, a 22-year-old University of Manitoba student, is driving down from Winnipeg this week to catch the weekend performances of "Spring Awakening" at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis. So, big deal?

Frances has seen the show 78 times. If the student rush line treats her right in Minneapolis, she'll add three notches on that belt before the weekend is over. Don't worry, gramps, I'll do the math for you: For tickets alone, that's more than $2,500. OMGICBYS!!!!!! (oh my god, I cannot believe you're serious -- exclamation marks).

Isn't it cool, isn't it groovy that the younger generation has found a piece of musical theater that has them so turned on? What is it, Frances, about this adaptation of Frank Wedekind's 1892 play about German schoolchildren coming of age that has you spending about $10,000 in two years -- when you throw in travel and lodging?

"People have asked me that before," she said by phone. "In December, I was in Arizona helping to film a documentary on one of the leads, and one of the questions they always ask me is, 'What does this show mean to you; what do you love about it?' And I could never answer it. Like, they asked me five different times. It's just really hard to pinpoint something specific."

Whuh? Seventy-eight times and you can't put into words what it is that turns you on? All right, young lady, go to your room and think about what you've done.

In the meantime, let's listen to Rob Knutson of Minneapolis, another 20ish devotee, explain how young people identify with the protagonists' struggle to understand their sexuality while surrounded by inhibited adults.

"If you don't teach your children about this, they're never going to know, and if you make them feel guilty about something that they're going to experience, you know, and they're going to be, you know, their body is going to tell them they have to, see that's what got me so good about the show. There's a kind of generation gap where you go through puberty, you understand what it's like to be confused and frustrated and then when your children are going through the same thing, you make it as difficult as possible for them by making them feel guilty."

Generation gap??!! Listen, junior, we invented the freakin' generation gap. And sexual freedom and free love and doing whatever turns you on and flippin' off the man. We're the original hipsters. Are you saying we're the old-timers now? Dude, that's just not possible, dude. It's, it's ... I'm sorry, what was I talking about?

Right. "Spring Awakening." Sex, rock 'n' roll, teen pregnancy, suicide, masturbation, rebellion, your whole repressive system of school and church and state. Composer Duncan Sheik and playwright Stephen Sater took Wedekind's dark social commentary and shot it through with pop music -- the lingua franca of teen angst.

No one gave the show a chance to be produced, then they said it'd never make Broadway. And then they said it would never win anything. And after eight Tony awards (including best musical), they said it would never tour and then that it would never play in the heartland. So here it is, playing one week in the cozy bosom of stoic Minnesota.

"It's gonna have an impact on our generation, very much the same way 'Rent' did when that came out," said University of Minnesota student Anna Pitera.

Striking a chord

Sheik and Sater, both Buddhists, met about 10 years ago. "We hit it off in this mystic way," Sater said. After producing an album, Sater suggested they do something for the stage. Sheik said yeah, but nothing conventional, where Curly and Laurey suddenly break into song. Sater agreed, and the two decided the tunes would function as interior monologues, expressed under the guise that everyone is a rock star in their own bedroom. And what if -- despite the modern rock -- they keep the scenic and period structure of Wedekind's fin de siècle Germany? That'd blow some minds, wouldn't it?

"It was a total risk," said Sheik. "We used to refer to it as an 'anti-musical.' We were trying to shake things up a little bit and trying to find a new way to do music as a way of telling a story."

After a few scenes were staged at La Jolla Playhouse in 1999, the show languished until the Atlantic Theater Company produced it off-Broadway in 2005. It opened the next year at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre and soon young people lined W. 49th Street each day for a rush ticket. They stayed late, too, clutching their Playbills, chatting up the stars at the stage door and snapping photos on their cell phones. The show closed last Sunday after nearly 900 performances.

"Somehow, we galvanized something about this generation," said Sater. "There's nothing postmodern or ironic about our songs, and somehow they struck a chord and that becomes the power of the show."

Not everyone was impressed.

Author Jonathan Franzen seized the moment of his publishing a new translation of Wedekind's "Spring Awakening" to flip the bird at Sater and Sheik. In his preface to the translation, Franzen said Sater had been rendered "insipid" by softening the blunt edges of the original.

Shawn-Marie Garrett, a Barnard College theater professor, suggested it was ludicrous for the female lead, Wendla, to express surprise that she is pregnant, given the sexual information available to contemporary youths. Logical, perhaps, but when has adolescence ever been ruled by logic?

"There's no logic," said Kent Knutson, Rob's father and a theater director at Minnetonka High School. "I don't care how much time passes or how much exposure we have to things, there is still an innocence and naiveté in the kids I work with. I've taught 37 years and I still see that wide-eyed innocence."

Knutson and his son saw "Spring Awakening" together in New York. He winced at the depiction of teachers ("I remember thinking, don't worry, you're in New York, nobody knows you") but felt keenly the theatrical power.

"It gave a voice through rock music, this screaming of kids, 'Listen to me, look at me,'" he said.

Ironically, Knutson said that he never would consider producing "Spring Awakening," a show that speaks to youth, at his high school. He noted that the current high school version of "Rent" is being shut down in many locations and fears the reaction to songs titled "The B**** of Living" and "Totally F*****" (and when they sing, the asterisks aren't there). It's a fair point, but still Rob Knutson called his old man chicken. Sure, the production would be controversial, but "I think the music is so powerful and the emotional content is so good that the lesson of it would be especially valuable there."

An inchoate passion

Frances Koncan wasn't blown away the first time she saw "Spring Awakening." Obviously, she grew to like it and ended up making many trips to New York and, after the tour began, to points West. So long as she can cover the costs, her parents don't mind, she said.

"It's definitely changed my life in a lot of different ways," she said. "I used to be very shy and never left Winnipeg. But you have to learn how to make friends quickly when you go to New York to see the show."

Pitera, the University of Minnesota student, and Ali Peterson, an 18-year-old senior at Park High School of Cottage Grove, will see the musical for the first time this week. They both are members of "The Guilty Ones," a guerrilla marketing group that is named for one of the songs. They notch points by putting up posters and fliers, wearing "Spring Awakening" T-shirts to the mall or school and making blog entries.

Pitera won a free ticket and an invitation to the opening-night cast party by racking up more than 5,000 points. She loves the music, but also the message that children need to feel free to talk to their parents about, you know, s-e-x.

"A friend of mine and her mom went out to see it in New York, and she [the friend] was like, 'By the beginning of the second act, my mom was burying her face in her seat, it was so embarrassing for her to be sitting next to me seeing this," Pitera said.

Peterson's "Guilty Ones" point total scored her the chance to buy a seat on stage (there are about 50 chairs on each side of the stage for spectators). "I know I'm going to have to control myself so I don't sing along and embarrass myself," she said.

When asked what has her so excited about the play, Peterson gave the perfect teen response. It's because, you know.

"It's about teenagers discovering themselves, so at the point of my life where I'm at right now, I can really relate to what they're singing," she said. "It's hard to explain because it's just the point I'm at in my life right now."

I dig. I don't understand it, but I dig.

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299