It was a bit slow to start and this reviewer thought she noticed a few opening night jitters but the cast of the Weston Little Theatre’s latest production quickly settled into their roles and gave the audience a comedic look at the difficult emotions of family dynamics and the pain of growing up.
Moon Over the Brewery, set in a family home in a small town, allows a unique glimpse into the emotions faced by overly responsible 13 year old Amanda as she struggles to come to terms with allowing the family to evolve without her control. Growing up with mom and Randolph couldn’t have been easy and Warren doesn’t present himself as a prime addition to the group.
The cast of four, which includes two newcomers to the Weston Little Theatre group, are up to their roles; both the wildly exaggerated and the one-liner wisecracks. Lee Ann Harris, David Thomas Lynch, Carlo Pileggi and Val Tait are not newcomers to acting and are likely to be seen again on the stage.
The staging of this two act play produced by Lynne Atkinson and directed by Fiona Stewart with the competent crew of the Weston Little Theatre offers an entertaining opportunity to remember that self-protection can build walls that exclude the opportunity for new growth.
Frank Wedekind's tragedy
Spring Awakening (written in 1891) is so far ahead of its
time that it seems more like a contemporary play written by, say,
Edward Bond set in the 1890's than a play actually written in
that period. It seems so modern because of its theme--teenage
sexuality--and its thorough critique of adult-run institutions--schools,
the church, even
the family--which can deal with this awakening of sexual knowledge
only by condemning and punishing it. Wedekind, however, avoids
the didacticism of someone like Bond by focussing on the characters
themselves and by showing us a range of responses to this growing
sexual awareness both by the teenagers and by the adults. The
play is a tragedy because it is the
adults who have made the world the way it is and who wield the
power to crush any threat to that stability such as the seeming
chaos of teenage sexuality.
If the awakening of sexuality is confusing to the adults, it
is even more confusing to the teenagers themselves, and an exploration
of these various feelings takes up the first half of the play.
Ed Gass-Donnelly, the director and designer, has assembled an
excellent cast of 18 actors, most of them young, for the 33 roles
in the play. Of the teenagers, Aaron Poole, in his first professional
appearance, is very effective as Melchior, a boy whose learning
about sex has undermined his idealism and faith and made him believe
that people are motivated only by egotism. Philip Riccio as Moritz,
Melchior's best friend, is superb at portraying a boy crushed
from outside by his parents' expectations of him and eroded from
within by his feeling of a desire. Riccio easily negotiates the
transitions in a crucial role that is by turns comic and tragic.
Dylan Trowbridge, in his one long monologue, was absolutely riveting
as a boy whose unfulfilled sexual desire has turned into an obsession
with painted nude female figures close to becoming pathological.
Holly Lewis ably plays Wendla, a girl who begins to equate sexuality
in
women with suffering and is sadly proved correct when she has
sex with Melchior. Melchior and Wendla are like Romeo and Juliet
without the romantic love or like Faust and Gretchen without the
idealism.
Among the adults, Colleen Williams is all too believable as Wendla's mother who never wants her daughter to grow up and can't bring herself to tell her the facts of life. And in the second act, Graham Harley steals the show as a sadistic schoolmaster who can barely conceal his glee at the prospect of expelling Melchior.
Ed Gass-Donnelly's work with Daniel Brooks shows in his minimalist
staging. Virtually all the scenes on the bare stage are played
on school desks and chairs or church pews, cleverly symbolizing
the pervasive influence of the adult-run institutions so inimical
to the children. One of the challenges of the play is that it
is written in two differing styles. The first act, ending with
the fatal steps taken by Moritz, Melchior and Wendla, is plays
naturalistically. In the second act where we see the consequences
of these steps the play become more and more expressionistic as
we enter into the nightmare that the three main children experience.
Gass-Donnelly expertly manages this transition. My main complaint
is that I think he could have gone farther in adapting Samuel
Elliot's sometimes awkward-sounding translation, although all
the actors cope with it very well.
"Spring Awakening", like "A Doll's House"
or "Miss Julie", is one of the key plays of the 19th
century, and this production shows us why. Circumstances may have
changed in 100 years, but Wedekind's portrayal of the confusion
children feel in moving from innocence to experience and the threat
adults feel at this awakening is still forceful and disturbing.
