“Spring Awakening”, the play that is staged at the Teatro La Plaza and that puts the magnifying glass on the mysteries of the adolescent mind

A good image to understand the appearance of adolescents in the culture is “The Sound of Music”. It is enough to remember the children of the Von Trapp family: until the mid-60s, the canon indicated that children between the ages of 5 and 16 greet visitors to the house and quickly hide in their rooms. They were invisible to adults.

“And in real life some children went on to fulfill adult tasks very soon, jobs inherited from the father. Adolescence is a phenomenon that has to do with certain moments in history, in the city”, notes Jorge Castro, director of “Despertar de primavera”, which is already being staged at the La Plaza theater. The irruption of fashions -such as the Beatles- shaped what is known today as adolescence and, precisely for this reason, it is curious that the same problems that were raised in said 1891 work are still valid. The name has changed, but the attitude is the same: is this dismissing minors eternal?

Castro, who is also a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist, understands that, in the creation of the German playwright Frank Wedekind, the protagonists are adolescents and their struggle between desire and duty, and the consequences of this conflict being very acute or with very severe repressions. It is not, however, demonizing parents and their ways of raising. “What is shown is the fear of talking about certain things, of telling the truth. There is the mistaken idea that it is better not to talk about some topics because they are going to put ideas in their heads, and that these ideas are going to lead them to do things for which they are not prepared, as if sexual impulses were going to created by talking about sexuality. They arise alone, without permission, and it is better to maintain a dialogue that accompanies and guides”.

To enhance the text, says the director, the artistic director of La Plaza proposed that the characters (who are 14, 15 years old) be played not by actors their age, but close ones. To this, Castro proposed that they themselves – whose ages range between 16 and 22 – also give life to adults. “All the work is told from conventions that do not hide their mechanisms, the idea is not that they hide that they also give life to adolescents, but that they are the point of view of the narration”. They are part of the project: Christian Calderón, Fabián Calle, Adriana Campos Salazar, Valeria Lazo, Fausto Molina, Mariagracia Mora, Merly Morello and Gustavo P. Billinghurst.

The weight of expectations

“Spring Awakening” accounts, in Castro’s words, for the “expectations of the father’s ego placed on the son and his weight”, which are usually expressed in phrases that deny the imbalance between his sacrifice at work to support their children and that they cannot pass the school subjects. Because adolescents who see themselves on stage “are pressured by the awakening of sexuality in a repressive world in this regard, as well as the demand to fulfill their duties and if I don’t measure up, I’ll kill myself.”

The point is that adults, who surely suffered from worse situations, do not know other ways. “They believe that the best thing for their children is to train them to know what they need to know, to walk the way they are supposed to walk. By worrying so much about it, they leave no room to stimulate each person’s capacity to think. But it is paradoxical: “When desires are more repressed, they usually find outlets in the most peculiar veins. The more options appear in the world to walk in it, the more questions one asks oneself”.