Shakespeare and Spring Awakening

Only a few weeks ago, the play "Spring Awakening" was performed by some of the students in the performing arts center. The play tells the story of teenagers who are beginning to discover different aspects of teenage sexuality. In the play, a young girl is challenging her growth through life while her mother provides her with no knowledge of sexuality and what consists of it. Desiring a deeper knowledge of sex, and reproduction, the girl demands to know where babies come from. However, her mother, unable to tell her daughter the truth, says that the only way to conceive a child, is to be in love. As this fake information spreads throughout the young girls of the town, they begin to explore the ideas of having sex. At the same time, the boys of the town begin to experience their own growths with puberty and how it makes their body feel. Slowly, through chance encounters, the young girl and boy meet and spark up a friendship and experience different emotions about their physical attraction to one another. While one girl in the group battles sexual abuse from her father at home and is unsure how to feel about it, others discover that their sexual experiences did in fact result in pregnancy. Through these confusions, the girls experience death, pain, and adulthood among their friends, and their new lovers. This week's reading of William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" displayed the constant struggle between love as well. No, the play did not consist of young girls and boys exploring their sexuality. However, it does consist of a woman named Viola, covering up her true sexuality in an attempt to be safe in a world that was unkind to women. In doing so,  she takes the name of her brother, Cesario who she believes to be lost at sea. In taking his name, Viola has now begun to gain feelings for her employer, Duke Orsino who is in love with another woman, Olivia. With all of this confusion and love claims, I felt a large relation to "Spring Awakening." I say this because both stories display a confusion through sexuality and what comes with it.