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Possibly the ultimate coming-of-age drama. The play follows a group of high-school friends in Victorian-age Germany who begin to experience their first sexual desires in a world where even talking about sex is taboo. Each struggles to travel the route from childhood to adulthood without a roadmap. Along the way they touch the heights of elation and the depths of despair while being forced to confront the problems of lust, sadism, masochism, rape, abortion, and homosexuality. Some survive the journey, others do not. Funny and horrifying by turns, the play explores the budding of those basic...

That it is a fatal error to bring up children, either boys or girls, in ignorance of their sexual nature is the thesis of Frank Wedekind's drama "Fruhlings Erwachen." From its title one might suppose it a peaceful little idyl of the youth of the year. No idea a could be more mistaken. It is a tragedy of frightful import, and its action is concerned with the development of natural instincts in the adolescent of both sexes. The playwright has attacked his theme with European frankness; but of plot, in the usual acceptance of the term, there is little. Instead of the coherent drama of...