Theater: Young Blood

SPRING AWAKENING by Frank Wedekind

Pity the adolescent caught between the grip of nature and the vise of society. At puberty, nature rushes him toward sexual awareness. Society puts up a fence of conventions. In this play, written in repressively conventional 1891 by German Playwright Frank Wedekind, some of the adolescents are impaled on the fence.

With an aptly symbolic hand, the bril liant Rumanian director-designer Liviu Ciulei has erected a high mesh screen across the middle of Joseph Papp's off-Broadway Public Theater. All scenes of institutional ritual occur behind it. Before it is a leafy ground of freedom where the high school children escape to their for bidden trysts and utter the long and some times lustrous thoughts of youth.

Ignorance leads to tragedy. Melchior (Boyd Gaines), an iconoclast-charmer, imparts some explicit sexual information to his friend, the ironically self-deprecating Moritz (Richard Frank). Flunking, engulfed in guilt, though innocent of sin, Moritz commits suicide. Avid for love, woefully unprepared by her mother (Rebecca Guy), Wendla (Kathryn Dowling) becomes pregnant by Melchior and dies during an abortion.

In bare recital, this scants the joy and tenderness which British Playwright Edward Bond's adaptation squeezes from Wedekind's text, and Ciulei's gift for mocking that hollow army of unalterable law made up of parents and teachers.

This production has been transplanted from the Juilliard Theater Center, and to judge by the cast, the school is nur turing some of the best and the brightest in their craft.