Life Goes On After Corky's Star Turn: A Neuro-Inclusive Theater Troupe Pushes Boundaries

Frank Wedekind wrote his provocative play about unfurling adolescence (in 14 year olds), 

and the adults who ignore it, between autumn 1890 and spring 1891. 

Frühlings Erwachen: Eine Kindertragödie is German for 

Spring Awakening: A Children's Tragedy. First staged in 1906 in Berlin, it is now playing

in NYC through May 19 in an EPIC Players production. 

I write about a range of things, from light to heavy. Coveted couches. Lamps with ruffly collars. Best vacuum cleaners. Stylish, beribboned handbags. Or early onset Alzheimer's. This online post from Brain & Life, from the American Academy of Neurology, is about a neuro-inclusive production of "Spring Awakening." I'm blogging about it here to coax you to see the musical in New York City between May 9 and 19. Nothing lightweight about it. It's thoughtful and real.

I am moved by the mission, the opportunity nonprofit EPIC provides for these actors. It does not matter if they've lived with autism since childhood or have Tourette syndrome or another diagnosis. It matters that they are actors who tell a story. Working actors who are paid for their performances. Beginning, middle and end.

As a girl and young woman in Bergen County, New Jersey, I saw few people with neurologic diagnoses. A sweet classmate at Saint Mary's, Janet, had an adorable younger brother with Down syndrome. His large family clearly loved and embraced him. He was not treated differently, or hidden. A high school crush (prom date) had an older sister who was not born like the rest of us. I saw her often at Sunday Mass. When I walked along winding Bedford Road to school, I heard a mother and a child, loud voices. I saw the boy, who did not look anything like me and my friends, get helped into a small van. I took calls on our black rotary phone from a woman collecting "old clothes." She said the money raised would help fund patterning* for kids with special needs. I loved watching Corky (with Down syndrome) and company, including Patti LuPone, on the Sunday night ABC-TV show "Life Goes On" (1989 to 1993).

Things are different now, improving. People with disabilities are more visible, as they should be. They have chances, like the rest of us. I saw EPIC's production of "Romeo and Juliet" in the winter and was rocked by it.

Here is some info. The first is the poster for the show that starts today and the three actor photos are from the EPIC website. I saw those actors in rehearsal in Brooklyn. So good. Click here to read more about them. Enjoy the show.

Shoshanna Gleich is masterful as the mother of Gwendla, a young girl who doesn't understand what sex is.

William Ketter stars as Melchior.

Sydney Kurland plays Gwendla.

About the original story, from Yale: 

https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/spring-awakening/

by Monika Grzesiak

Social taboos: The presence of teenage sexuality, abortion, homosexuality, masturbation, rape, etc. in the play show an attempt to force audiences of the early 1900s to confront issues that were not discussed in polite society. The teachers and parental figures in Spring Awakening, representative of bourgeois society, refuse to speak about these things, and the result is the death of two teenagers.

Morality: In Spring Awakening, Wedekind presents morality as a social construction. He blames the tragic ending of the play on the hypocritical moral code of society, or, as Leroy Shaw puts it, “an attitude toward it based on an exaggerated sense of piety and a false notion of what morality really is.”

*Physical therapy especially for neurological impairment based on a theory holding that repeated manipulation of body parts to simulate normal motor developmental activity (such as crawling or walking) promotes neurological development or repair.