A Spring Awakening

The space between Sonya Dadekian and the stage felt charged, like the static clinging to an showtune record, waiting to unleash a long-forgotten sound. The music playback device hummed, filling every faint corner of the room in back of the theatre—an odd piece of furniture in this moment, a nod to precision, to accuracy, but always a little off-kilter, as if the slight imperfections of the music was what gave life to the world.

Sonya, assistant stage manager for Spring Awakening at Florida Southern College, speaks words soft but assured, paints a world in shades of movement and script. “Basically, I’m gonna be… second-in-command to the stage manager,” she explains. It’s her first time in this role, and she seems both excited and slightly detached, as though she is an electrician going through the mechanics of something larger than herself, completely foreign, a machine made of people, stories, and memories—an engine humming beneath the surface of musical theatre.

The production is an odd, gruesome beast, a collision of German high school students and the darkest corners of human experience. Spring Awakening thrives in the discomfort of adolescence and societal repression, wading through swamps of sex, death, and the ever-looming specter of the unknown. Sonya, navigating the props and the pacing backstage, sees the stage as a living thing. “It’s really deep… really fantastic,” she muses, her tone laced with the kind of reverence reserved for something half-understood yet deeply felt.

She talks about set pieces, static yet dynamic, “‘West Side Story’-looking,” though she quickly retracts, like catching herself misstepping in the choreography of language. 

“I don’t know that’s not really something super comparable… it’s pretty heavy”

The set, a still life, will carry the weight of the narrative, with no changes, just layers upon layers of meaning emerging from what the actors—Sonya’s peers—bring to the scene. 

But it’s the sex, death, and suicide in Spring Awakening she’s thinking about, wondering how to balance the visceral with the respect owed to both audience and performers.

“It’s going to be quite a challenge to make sure that the heaviness of the show is portrayed to the audience, and we want to make sure that it’s in a respectful way”

“Spring Awakening” premiering at Florida Southern College. (@flsoutherntheatre on Instagram)

Then, a sudden shift—death in her own world. 

Sonya recalls her kindergarten teacher, a woman whose life, like so many others, ended in violence, “an unfortunate incident with her son.” Her voice slows, quieting the noise of the room for just a moment, as the weight of this personal tragedy presses in, shaping everything unspoken, leaving the room thick with a visceral tension. Tears welled up in her eyes.

“It’s always hard when something happens to somebody you’d never assume.”

The universe, Sonya believes, deals in karma, an equilibrium of light and dark. 

But in her eyes, there’s a glimmer of something raw, an understanding that, like theater, life moves with ambiguity, as both the stage and the world blur into one. In both worlds, there exists sex, death, and acting.

“When things are good, they eventually become bad, but they’ll always come back up to good.”

Spring Awakening opens on Nov. 15th and runs through Nov. 17th, and restarts on Nov. 23rd, continuing through Nov. 26th.