Entertainment

‘Spring,’ once awoken, now goes back to sleep

For a play about sexually confused, 19th-century German teens — one involving masturbation, homosexuality, masochism, rape, abortion and suicide — Frank Wedekind’s “Spring’s Awakening” is awfully dull. At least it comes off that way in the Marvell Rep’s static revival, which practically begs for a good alt-rock music score.

That, of course, is what it got in Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s Tony-winning 2006 adaptation. Starring such up-and-coming talents as Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff and John Gallagher Jr., it brought this 1891 work — banned upon its premiere — to throbbing musical life.

Performed on a mostly bare stage overhung by a desultory tree branch belying the play’s title, this rendition is alternately tedious and over-the-top. Admittedly, it’s a fiendishly difficult work to pull off, filled as it is with lugubrious monologues and such hard-to-stage episodes as a group pleasuring scene. Director Lenny Leibowitz hasn’t managed to overcome its challenges, as evidenced by a frantic masturbation scene whose young performer seems to be emulating Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor.

Daringly provocative for its time, Wedekind’s dialogue, as translated here by Eric Bentley, seems hopelessly quaint.

“Have you felt them?” one young man asks his friend. “The stirrings of manhood?” Says a girl, admiringly, of a fellow student: “He has a lovely forehead.”

Although the cast is suitably youthful, most have great difficulty with their parts and are hard to understand. Among the exceptions are Lizzy DeClement and Dalton Harrod as, respectively, the doomed, pregnant Wendla and the despondent outcast Moritz. It comes as a relief in the evening’s second half when seasoned adult performers arrive as the repressive professors who help seal the younger characters’ fates.

Running a slow three hours, “Spring’s Awakening” is a disappointment after Marvell’s stirring revival earlier this year of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi.” Ironically, the most resonant aspect of the production, part of the adventurous troupe’s “Burned & Banned” series of controversial plays, came 20 minutes before its conclusion Friday night, when a fire alarm went off repeatedly and the audience was forced to evacuate.

Even today, it seems, “Spring’s Awakening” is still incendiary.