TOPIC A.(Spring Awakening)(Theater review)

At one point in Michael Mayer's exciting musical reimagining of Frank Wedekind's 1891 play "Spring Awakening" (at the Atlantic Theatre Company), the fresh-faced teen-agers in a late-nineteenth-century provincial German town dream of the salvation of the flesh. "Touch me--just like that," they sing. "Now lower down, where the sins lie." To a modern ear, the word "sin" in this context sounds almost Chaucerian. Sex is never simple, which is why we need stories about it; these days, however, the idea of sin has, for the most part, been removed from those stories--and with it has gone the thrill of trespass. Positioned somewhere between the Puritan past and the casual present, "Spring Awakening" occupies an unusual space in the anatomy of desire: it manages to resuscitate a sense of danger and anarchy in adolescent passion.

The teen-agers, who yearn and struggle, do the singing here, while in the stifling world of adulthood--personified by two actors (Frank Wood and Mary McCann) who play a variety of authority figures--song is an impossibility. "Spring Awakening" trades in atmospheres, not explanations. In the short opening scene, which lays out the blinkered sexual mores of the period, a girl named Wendla (the excellent Lea Michele) demands that her mother tell her the truth about where babies come from. To make it easier on both of them, she wraps her head in an apron before resting it on her mother's lap. The unnerving image--an echo of Magritte--conveys both the blindness and the shame that envelop issues of the body. It also obliquely reinforces Wendla's lament: "Mama who bore me," she sings. "Mama who gave me / No way to handle things."

The awakening here, it turns out, is not just to sexuality but also to musical storytelling. Mayer makes no concessions to naturalism; he takes aim, instead, at the internal landscape. The abstracted world that he summons up has a universality that allows a German locale to blend easily with the strong melodic lines and dramatic percussive flourishes of the composer Duncan Sheik's American sound. The merger of the repressive Old World and the rebellious New World is illustrated scenically by the intelligent stylization of Susan Hilferty's costumes: man-children in breeches, knee socks, and high-top sneakers; girl-women in simple earth-tone shifts. Bill T. Jones's choreography imposes on the teen-agers a subtle semaphore of gesture, which suggests in its jaggedness their ferocity and emotional fragmentation. It's a sort of St. Vitus' dance, a mad ecstasy, which erupts for the first time at a Latin lesson, where we are introduced to the freethinking youth Melchior (the superb Jonathan Groff), who challenges all received opinions, especially those about sex. He defines his disenchantment neatly in song: "It's the bitch of living-- / And living in your head. / It's the bitch of living / And sensing God is dead."

Steven Sater's lyrics negotiate the play's melodrama deftly. He manages to find an idiom that is at once artful and disjointed, suggestive of unformed teen-age thought and yet eloquent. In "Don't Do Sadness," for instance, Melchior's sidekick, the bumbling Moritz (John Gallagher, Jr.), whose spiky hair makes him look like Johnny Rotten and whose numbers swagger with defensive punk nihilism, sings, "I don't do sadness. So been there. / Don't do sadness. Just don't care." In "My Junk," a song about the adolescents' confusing sexual fantasies, one girl sings, "I try and just kick it, but then, what can I do? / We've all got our junk, and my junk is you." Sater's accomplishment is to convey, in the youths' syntactical fumblings, the inadequacy of speech to cope with the vortex of feeling. When a courtship develops between Wendla and Melchior, Wendla asks him to hurt her. "I've never been beaten--my entire life. I've never . . . felt . . . anything," she says, unleashing in Melchior a terrifying violence. Moritz, thinking about the separation he feels from his family, sings, "Still, I'll split, and they'll, like . . . Well, who knows. . . . Just fuck it--right? ...