Spring’s Awakening

Benjamin Franklin Wedekind, usually known as Frank Wedekind, was a German playwright born in 1864 in Hanover, Germany. His work, which often criticizes bourgeois attitudes (particularly towards sex), is considered to anticipate expressionism, and he was a major influence on the development of epic theatre. He died in March 1918.

Kenneth Tigar graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in German Literature. He then studied in Göttingen for a year as a Fulbright scholar. Shortly after earning a Harvard Ph.D. in German as well, he was offered an acting job with the Viennese theatre group Die Komödianten. The experience began his transition from the world of academia to the world of the theatre. Since then he has become a familiar face in films and on television. His credits span the distance from Barney Miller and the Lethal Weapon movies to The Good Wife and The Avengers. He has acted extensively in New York and regional theatres, performing Salieri in AMADEUS, Willy Loman in DEATH OF A SALESMAN, and Joe Keller in ALL MY SONS, amongst others. He has won a Los Angeles Drama Critics' Circle Award, two Dramalogue Awards, and South Florida's Carbonell Award; and he has appeared across the country in his one-man show I MUST BE MR. BOSWELL about the biographer of Dr. Johnson. He directed the national tour of THE GIN GAME with Academy Award–winner Kim Hunter and is also an accomplished opera director. A few years ago he returned to Austria to star in OLD WICKED SONGS at the Vienna English Theatre. Most recently he was seen on Broadway in Larry David's comedy FISH IN THE DARK.

Clayton Koelb is the Guy B. Johnson Distinguished Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. A graduate of Harvard College (where he was a classmate of Kenneth Tigar) and of the Harvard Graduate School (PhD 1970), he is the author of many books and articles on European literature and culture. His translation of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice has been in print in the Norton Critical Edition series since 1994. His most recent books are The Revivifying Word: Literature, Philosophy, and the Theory of Life in Europe’s Romantic Age and Kafka: A Guide for the Perplexed.