Steven Sater is an enigma. In the world of stage musicals, the Tony-, Grammy- and Olivier Award-winning writer is the equivalent of Yoda. And yet he has only had one Broadway show.
It’s neither here nor there that he poured his heart and soul into Spring Awakening, which he co-wrote with his musician friend Duncan Sheik, and which has been called “one of the most revered new musicals of the 21st century”. Showbiz has become very hard, he says — especially the kind of groundbreaking, consciousness-shifting stuff he’s interested in.
“The structures governing the production of art around the world have made it increasingly difficult to break through,” Sater tells the FM, speaking from New York. “In theatres, if you don’t have a brand name or a star or a title that’s already been a movie, it’s really tough to get your work put on.”
Still, as Spring Awakening approaches the 20th anniversary of its 2006 debut in New York, there have been revivals and revisits, including 2022’s reunion concert with the original cast, which was filmed for a gut-wrenching HBO documentary.
Locally a meaty production has been running in Cape Town, and it is coming to Joburg this month. With a polished cast and a raw, gutsy treatment by director Sylvaine Strike, it’s a masterclass in how theatre can be both a punch to the gut and utterly captivating.
Sater’s book and lyrics for the show, which opened after seven years of workshopping and concert performances, were based on an 1891 expressionist play by Frank Wedekind. Immediately banned in Germany because of its frank themes, it wasn’t staged for 15 years. While ahead of its time, it explored timeless issues that to this day affect children, especially how they’re kept in the dark with respect to sexuality.
Sater says the story is basically about “the deafness of adults to what’s going on in the hearts of young children”. It explores the puritanical status quo in a conservative Lutheran community, with teachers and clergy tight lipped and parents too closed-minded, embarrassed or prude to openly communicate with their children.
Its themes may be ancient, but Wedekind ventured into heady territory that, in the context of a musical set in a more conservative era, feels somehow more radical. And there’s a heightened edginess thanks to the anachronistic rock music that the cast stomp and grind to. Often, they sing gripping mics, as if they’re performing their cathartic punk-infused songs at a concert. In other moments, their haunting ballads simply squeeze the tears right out of you.
The adaptation took eight Tony Awards in 2007, including that of Best Musical, and minted several stars, including then unknown actor Jonathan Groff, who played Melchior, the boy at the centre of the story — a kind of precocious philosopher and adorably deep-thinking and dashing hero who wants to taste life with the entirety of his being. In the current South African production he’s played by Dylan Janse van Rensburg, who is a revelation in the role — a fresh, truthful and frankly brilliant performance, the kind that makes it difficult to believe he’s still a student.
As are most of the cast: they’re Gen Zs whose natural proximity to the adolescent characters they play seems to compound the atmosphere of urgency, the feeling that what you’re witnessing is real.
‘A cry from the soul’
This is not your garden variety musical that feels like a pantomime with singalong appeal and mindless feel-good vibes. Sater set out to ground the production in a theatrical language that would have lasting impact and could resonate eternally like the classic Greek tragedies that informed his adaptation of the play and the manner in which he conceived the songs.
Sater, who describes himself as “bottled up with longing and unfulfillable desire”, says he has “a profound devotion to art that’s a sort of cry from the soul that finds expression through works of literature and painting and sculpture that last through the ages”.
He says he’s long been struck by the imagery conjured by great poets, by “those tragic ancient Greek stories”, and by Shakespeare, who “created so many emblematic moments” in theatre. He calls them “stage pictures”: Lady Macbeth washing hands that can never be clean, or Hamlet looking at a skull, contemplating his mortality.
“I yearn for the works that are like religious monuments in a time of unprecedented crisis. When people went to the theatre as they would go to a temple. They would go to be cleansed. They would go for an awakening, for a recognition of themselves. That’s what I yearn for.”
Of his vision for Spring Awakening, he says: “I wanted to create a theatre piece that has emblematic moments that come from deep, mythic stories. They’re about these parts of ourselves that we don’t want to face, that we haven’t faced or that we can’t face but that theatre can allow us to understand.”
There is indeed something Shakespearean about Spring Awakening, something truthful and emblematic about the characters and their longings and missteps, the way tragedy befalls the innocents while life goes on and hope for the future is conveyed.
While books and poetry and Greek tragedies were his first loves, Sater is also a devout Buddhist, and there is something of that belief system — he calls it a philosophy of humanism — in the musical. “Buddhist philosophy informs the lyrics,” he says. “Simple things such as awakening to your own darkness, embracing your own darkness rather than denying it.”
Sater discovered Buddhism and chanting after a near-fatal tragedy when, shortly after turning 20, he woke up to find himself trapped in a burning apartment. When he caught fire and had to jump from his balcony to escape, he broke 14 vertebrae and was in hospital for months, laid out flat, mostly motionless.
The experience flipped a switch for him.
“One night at 4am, there was a nun in the hospital and she said to me: ‘God saved you for a reason.’ I didn’t even believe in God, but those words sent a shiver through my body.”
He was suddenly deeply aware of the need to make work that could make a difference and would have a lasting impact. “In that moment, I decided I had to create things that can last. And so that’s what I started doing.”
In hospital he also taught himself ancient Greek and immersed himself more deeply in those mythic tragedies. Acquainting himself more intimately with Greek choruses gave him a basis for how he wanted Spring Awakening’s songs to function. “I realised that I could approach the lyrics in a more profound way — that each song could convey what otherwise cannot be said.”
Those songs help to convey a frank and unflinching portrait of the inner landscape of the adolescents at its heart. The mysteries of sexual discovery, the fantasies, the masturbation, the sticky dreams and mind-of-their-own genitals, all of these are sung about, along with much harder issues such as sexual abuse and suicide.
Sater’s lyrics give the audience access to the characters’ most intimate fears and anxieties, their hopes and dreams. And there’s a deep sense that whatever disconnect existed between adults and teenagers growing up in Germany in the late-1800s, the battle to restore that connection continues in our own era of ceaseless online access and digital stimulation overload.
Sater says there are definite similarities between the refusal by adults in the musical to be truthful with their children and the mechanics of our current age of disinformation. “There’s so much lying. And it’s just so pervasive. And there’s a large percentage of Americans who have kind of effectively lost their minds.”
In Spring Awakening, the warning is that even white lies born out of priggishness — a mother too embarrassed to tell her daughter about sex — have tragic consequences.
Creating myths
As much as Spring Awakening is about adults lying to children, it is also about the isolation of youth, of feeling that no-one else understands your anxieties as you face fierce and sometimes overwhelming physical and emotional changes.
Sater’s own childhood involved an extreme form of isolation, born out of illness that began with pneumonia and went on for years. “I had profound experiences of isolation, of being in an oxygen tent, of being alone in the hospital. I hardly went to school until the sixth or seventh grade and I wasn’t allowed to have friends over.”
To fill the void, he turned to books and was reading Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman by age 11; and he wrote plays. Poetry was his escape and he became sensitised to the power of words, perhaps early on recognising their potential to shift consciousness.
Whether a piece of theatre can legitimately claim to change the world today, Sater is uncertain. Like Yoda, though, he expresses hope, refuses to quit dreaming of a better world. “[WH] Auden said poetry makes nothing happen, but I hope it can. I believe you have to live, try to learn, and impart the lessons. It’s all we can do. It’s all I can do.”
Certainly, if you want to experience theatre’s potential to move the atoms in your body, there are few better places to start than at Spring Awakening. You undergo a transformation with the actors on stage. You walk in, you’re one person; you walk out, you’re different. It’s what theatre is meant to be: a shared, transcendental experience.
“If theatre is not about catharsis, then what is it about?” Sater asks. “If it’s not about coming to terms with who we are, if it’s not about Oedipus sitting with what he did and tearing out his eyes, then what is it? That’s what I always wanted to create: myths like new.”
* Spring Awakening is at Montecasino from April 12 until May 5
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.