Before rehearsals properly began for Spring Awakening, director and adapter Paolo Santalucia sent his cast to a park with an unusual assignment: find something — anything, in nature or around them — and generate a question about it that the internet couldn’t answer.
For Jake Bunyan and Olivia Neary-Hatton, who make their professional Toronto debuts playing Melchior Gabor and Wendla Bergman in the play, the exercise ended up describing most of what they would spend the following months learning. “There’s a different kind of learning that comes with being able to hold a question, instead of immediately having answers,” Bunyan explains. Pushing further, Neary-Hatton names the particular paradox of trying to do this in 2026: “There’s so much information that you kind of get lost in it — in a similar way to having no information at all.”
Bunyan, who journals and reads widely, connects the impulse to what draws him to writing in the first place: his favourite authors are “good at painting a picture around something, without going directly at the thing.”
Spring Awakening – the play
This discipline — of sitting with a question, rather than reaching for an answer — is what the teenagers in Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening are denied by every adult around them. Written in 1891 and set in a small German town, the play follows a group of adolescents on the threshold of adulthood.
Melchior, the class’ brightest and most restless student, pushes against a rigid curriculum and moral order that he’s already outgrown. Wendla, curious about her body and future, finds her questions met with evasion by the adults who should guide her. And around them, classmates navigate exams, ambition, hormonal angst and the fear of disappointing their elders — with only silence, rumour, punishment, and half-understood information. What starts as curiosity and connection between Melchior and Wendla, and pressure and secrecy among their friends, sets in motion consequences the adults are unwilling to see coming … and then unable to undo.
Written before adolescence was even widely recognized as a distinct developmental stage, the play was banned and censored for years for its frank treatment of puberty, sexuality, pregnancy, and suicide. It premiered in Berlin in 1906, and its first English-language production, in New York in 1917, survived a bid to shut it down as pornography only because a trial court intervened. It found an entirely new audience in 2006, when its musical adaptation transferred to Broadway and won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
In the western world today, there are precious few human mysteries: after all, every young person carries a portal to information and pornography in the smartphone in their pocket. So Wedekind’s play feels a little quaint, in that information withheld about the mechanics of the sex act is one major driver of its drama. The play nonetheless retains its power as a sharp critique of authoritarian control. “The tragedy of the play begins when adults mistake authority for knowledge — when they withhold truth, instead of trusting young people with it,” Santalucia has said of his reasons for choosing it. The production marks his first production as Soulpepper’s Artistic Director, and is something of a homecoming: he’s a Soulpepper Academy graduate returning to lead the institution, with Associate Direction from Soulpepper Associate Artistic Director Luke Reece.
“Faith in the future”
Santalucia calls the production itself “an act of faith in the future,” built on the conviction that young people are often first to understand the changes re-shaping their lives, and that the job of those who came before is not to steer them toward a remembered world, but to equip them with truth … and get out of the way.
That faith shows up in the play’s casting. Santalucia has assembled a diverse multigenerational ensemble, which thrusts youth — in the form of Soulpepper Academy members Noah Beemer, Jasmine Case, Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu, and Bunyan and Neary-Hatton — to the forefront.
Supporting them in adult roles are Soulpepper veterans Raquel Duffy, Daren A. Herbert, Diego Matamoros, and Liisa Repo-Martell; and actors EJ Candelaria, Justin Eddy, Raylene Harewood, Eric Miracle, Mackenzie Wojcik and Jake Cohen.
For Bunyan, who is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada and trained earlier at Calgary’s Company of Rogues, the initial connection to Santalucia occurred in an unsuccessful audition for a different play. For Neary-Hatton, who is a graduate of Toronto Metropolitan University’s acting program, the road was more circular: she first worked on Spring Awakening with Santalucia in a workshop during her final year of school, went on to other projects on stage and screen, then returned to audition for the role of Wendla when he decided to mount it.
Neither actor knew the play or its musical adaptation prior, and both found their characters by looking inward rather than outward. Bunyan describes Melchior as a young man on the cusp of graduation, who is dissatisfied with the small-mindedness of his town and teachers, and driven by “this burning desire for the life he imagines is out there, but can’t quite get a grasp on.” Bunyan avers that he shares the character’s “a hunger for experience,” and notes that Melchior has “more questions than answers” — an artist’s spirit, if you will … though art is never presented to him as an option.
Meanwhile, Neary-Hatton sees Wendla as “the young girl who just wants to be in the world and experience everything. She’s very tactile, so she has to feel something to know it’s real.” What struck Neary-Hatton most in rehearsal was discovering how much agency and determination the character carries. It’s become a process of reconnecting with a younger, more admired part of herself, “continuously finding the deeper levels of all of those things that Wendla has.”
Holding one another up
The spirit of personal excavation extends to the broader ensemble. Bunyan is unequivocal about the energy and commitment of the cast, affirming that “everyone’s really showing up, bringing everything they’ve got”. Neary-Hatton is delighted by how much fun they have been able to have while mounting a play this serious. Working alongside so many young people feels “like being in theatre school again,” with a group of people “experiencing life and bouncing off of each other” in ways that end up fuelling the work itself.
Collaborating with the company’s veterans has also helped both actors to hone their performances. Neary-Hatton speaks with particular warmth about acting opposite Repo-Martell, who plays her mother, calling it an immediate kind of learning. Meanwhile, Bunyan describes scenes with Matamoros and Herbert, who play the disciplinarian educators, as an exercise in trust that “goes both ways.” The seasoned actors are taking “big swings” and have invited the newer artists to push back, rather than simply defer. Some of the play’s most intense and visually striking scenes centre this conflict.
Such trust is more integral here than it might be for a lighter play. On the Soulpepper stage, the show feels somehow brittle, thanks to its emotional truth but dated details. Yet in that Spring Awakening explores subjects like puberty, sexuality, sexual violence, shame, and abortion, there is a real cost to the young actors of performing this show eight times a week. Bunyan describes a balance that he is still learning to strike: leaving the work in the room or on the stage at the end of the day, and picking it up again the next day without carrying it home … while at the same time recognizing — and acknowledging — how the play’s weightier material intersects with things already present in his own life. What grounds him most is staying connected to his friends, touching base at the end of each day, and maybe going to grab dinner. “Just stepping out of it for a bit.”
Neary-Hatton credits the ensemble for holding her up during the intensity of this experience but is candid that her character’s experiences do not stay neatly fictional. “My actor self might be saying, ‘that’s not real.’ But in some ways, my body is like, ‘Oooh’…. It holds that experience still.” Her process has become one of figuring out, day by day, exactly what she needs: sometimes a friend to hold her shoulders after a scene and sometimes a bath at home to let it wash away. What she’s learned, above all, is “to listen to where you’re at” and to ask out loud for what she requires. “Needing things, asking for things” and trusting the group to provide them has built the ensemble’s closeness.
Sitting with uncertainty
Bunyan and Neary-Hatton are about to put that same trust to the test … on themselves. Their next show is Parfumerie, and the remainder of the year will be a whirlwind of training at Soulpepper Academy.
But after that, neither has any idea what comes next.
For Bunyan, not knowing circles back to the start of our conversation. “The play leaves off on an uncertain note,” he observes, “which goes back to what I was saying about being able to hold a question — being able to not know what might come next, but being willing to step into it anyway, and stay open enough to know there will be a next step … even if you don’t know what it is yet.” It’s not easy, he concedes. “There’s hope in doubt. But to be open to hope, you have to be open to disappointment, too.”
It’s heartening to hear: these actors are performing the same act of faith that Santalucia wanted to extend to their new generation. Wedekind’s century-old play about withheld answers has survived to 2026 – and thrives on the Soulpepper stage, thanks to their willingness to sit in their own uncertainty, rather than rush to resolve it.
Audience members taking in this unique theatrical experience should take a cue.
Spring Awakening runs at Soulpepper’s Baillie Theatre until October 18, 2026. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
