Ivrea, Awakening of spring, censorship and oppression of adults on adolescents

Ivrea. Appointment at the Giacosa theater in Ivrea, Tuesday 4, at 8.45 pm, with the show Spring Awakening in which the director Gabriel Vacis directs the newly graduated actors of the Scuola del Teatro Stabile of Turin in one of the fundamental works in the history of contemporary theatre: the most important text by the German playwright Frank Wedekind, which recounts with an intensity still intact today the censorship and oppression that the world of adults project onto adolescents.

«In the Spring Awakening – explains Vacis – there are Moritz, Melchior, Wendla, Hanschen, Ilse, Martha, just fourteen years old each. And around them, together with them, there is a generation that doesn’t know it’s lost. Like all generations of teenagers. Adults are silent, they don’t have the words to handle the change that is coming, and when they speak they don’t know what to say, and they cause trouble. The boys feel their body change, the awakening of the title animates their dreams and their fears, there are no teachers who can teach them how to survive».

«And so – continues the director – sex, rape, abortion, homosexuality and suicide go hand in hand with math homework, pink ribbons to pass through shirts, forget-me-nots to catch from the river. It is a work that reflects all the ghosts of a twentieth century that was about to arrive. Until our new millennium.”

Wedekind wrote Spring Awakening, whose subtitle is Children’s Tragedy, in 1891, a time when talking about the age of discovery of sexuality was considered taboo, so much so that it faced censorship for many years. From then on, the adolescent disturbances brought about by the discrepancy between the growth of bodies and psychological immaturity could no longer be ignored. At that time Stalin, Einstein, Walser, Trotsky and Klee were thirteen, but, as the hall notes recall «in his thirteen-year-old characters of the time shine the same pains of the thirteen-year-olds of today, the kids born in 2010, who listen to Billie Eilish and XXXTentacion, who know what an economic crisis is because they were born into it, who can know the things of the world because the world doesn’t end up in the woods outside their city and because those borders no longer exist. But there are those who continue to build higher and higher walls. How is it possible that this late 19th century Germany is so close to us? How is it possible that Wedekind saw the suicides of boys, sentimental education still non-existent today, the pain of those who “play the part of Bluebeard” among the meshes of time?».

Tickets: stalls, 24 euros (+3.50); boxes, 22 (+3); gallery, 14 (+2); 2nd sector, 10 (+1.50). Info and pre-sales: in Ivrea, at the Contato del Canavese (tel. 0125 641 161), and at the Book Gallery (tel. 0125 641 212); in San Giorgio, at the Tabaccheria Truffo (0124 450 710); in Rivarolo, at the Il Punto Bookshop (0124 26 492).