Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind

From Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of The Corrections and Crossroads, comes his razor-sharp translation of Frank Wedekind's major modern play, Spring Awakening.

Featuring an introduction by Franzen.

First performed in Germany in 1906, Frank Wedekind's controversial play Spring Awakening closed after one night in New York in 1917 amid charges of obscenity and public outrage. For the better part of the twentieth century Wedekind's intense body of work was largely unpublished and rarely performed. Yet the play's subject matter--teenage desire, suicide, abortion, and homosexuality--is as explosive and important today as it was a century ago. Spring Awakening follows the lives of three teenagers, Melchior, Moritz, and Wendl, as they navigate their entry into sexual awareness. Unlike so many works that claim to tell the truth of adolescence, Spring Awakening offers no easy answers or redemption.

Today, more than a hundred years after the play's first performance, a new musical version of this essential modern masterpiece is being hailed as the best new musical . . . in a generation (John Heilpern, The New York Observer). Franzen's rendition of the text--for so long poorly served in English--is unique in capturing the bizarre and inimitable comic spirit that animates almost every line of this unrelentingly tragic play. There couldn't be a better time for this thrilling, definitive new translation.

Frank Wedekind (1864-1918) had a major influence on the development of German drama in the twentieth century. His plays depict a society torn apart by the demands of desire and greed, and his powerful writing continues to offend and shock; even in the 1960s, his plays were denied a performing license in the United Kingdom.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780865479784
ISBN 10	086547978X
Title	Spring Awakening
Author	Frank Wedekind
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year published	2007-09-04
Number of pages	112
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable