a brilliant fable of sexuality, personal responsibility and individual thought in a time of repressive social values.” 
Cinnamon Schultz as Wendla
Ernst (Steven Wargo) becomes an adult.
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Melchior before the faculty (Jason Douglas and company)
100 years before it became a musical, Frank Wedekind wrote a crazy, proto-expressionistic play about the cascading failure of parents to protect children and the structures of civil society to support parents. This production is my adaptation of Wedekind’s original text. A shattered fairy tale that begins with innocents at peace with nature and ends quite unnaturally with a headless guy walking around carrying his own head under his arm.
Addressing head-on that it is a play about castes, we created 3 levels of characters: the children (played by actors in their 20’s), the parents (played by actors on stilts and wearing head pieces to make them some 8 feet tall), and the teachers, priests, etc. – the talking heads of society (played by actors inside 10 foot tall rubber heads). The highly theatrical nature of the production also allowed for an ensemble of puppeteers who controlled everything from the animals in the Edenic opening and Wendla’s (ever-diminishing) cloud of butterflies, to the dance-like movement of the scenic elements and the ominous clicking of the knitting needles that underscored Wendla’s final scene before she is taken off for her ill-fated abortion. effective… |
