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Tragedies of sex

Chapter 5: A Note on the Staging
By Frank Wedekind
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About This Book

A quartet of plays dramatizes the collision between sexual instinct and repressive social orders, following young people and an alluring woman whose desires and consequences expose hypocrisy, exploitation, and destructive passions. The pieces shift between intimate realism and expressionist, episodic scenes, using frank sexual situations, satire, and grotesque imagery to critique bourgeois morality, legal and religious constraints, and the commodification of bodies. Tone alternates between tragic and sardonic, with recurring motifs of awakening, corruption, and moral collapse, and the structure privileges confrontational dialogue and stark stagecraft to provoke moral reflection rather than offer resolution.

A Note on the Staging

Spring’s Awakening is divided into Nineteen Scenes as follows:

Act I: Scene 1. In Mrs. Bergmann’s House.
Scene 2. A Park.
Scene 3. The Same.
Scene 4. The School Yard.
Scene 5. In the Woods.
Act II: Scene 1. Melchior’s Study.
Scene 2. Same as I, 1
Scene 3. In the Rilow House.
Scene 4. A Hayloft.
Scene 5. Mrs. Gabor’s Room.
Scene 6. The Bergmann Garden.
Scene 7. A Path near the River.
Act III: Scene 1. The Faculty Room at the School.
Scene 2. By the Wall of the Graveyard.
Scene 3. In the Gabor House.
Scene 4. In the House of Correction.
Scene 5. Wendla’s Bedroom.
Scene 6. A Vineyard.
Scene 7. The Graveyard.

It will be noted that the scenes concluding the acts, long scenes all of them, are intended to occupy the full stage, and that the prior scenes in each act may be played in the foreground.

Two of the scenes, II, 3, and III, 6, have nothing to do with the story and to save time may be omitted, though the latter has another importance, lightening with its idyllic atmosphere the squalor and bitterness of the last act. If it is omitted, III, 4, and III, 5, might be played in reverse order.

The simplest arrangement of the stage would be a neutral proscenium, six or seven feet deep, pierced with doors. Behind this, different backwalls can be lowered, and all the interior scenes played in this shallow front space. On the back of the stage should be sloping ground covered with underbrush, and a path winding down through it. In the middle-stage can be set the properties for special scenes—a bench in a box-hedge for I, 2 and 3; a huge oak-trunk for I, 5; a garden wall with grass and violets for II, 6; the graveyard wall with Moritz’s grave for III, 2, etc. The swiftest possible sequence of scenes within the act is of prime importance.