He takes this great documentary stage, and a sweet story of emotional awakening and then makes it ugly, cruel, twisted!

"Joy" concerns the sexual and emotional awakening of an 18-year-old girl, convincingly played by Severn Thompson, on an afternoon of faint intrigue in a, yes, sumptuous English garden.

Almost immediately, Jack triggers an emotional and sexual awakening in Harriet, jolting her into an awareness of all she has been missing in life.

While Mr. Jennings's emotional awakening is probably all too small to give the play much of a lift in the end, it does lessen the taste of ashes in your mouth.

While she refers repeatedly to her emotional and political awakenings, her observations are often too rushed or solipsistic to be wholly effective.

The macabre paradox of "Passion" is that Giorgio's emotional awakening nearly destroys him.

And sometime this fall, she hopes to do "Happy All the Time," written by Julius Epstein of "Casablanca" fame - about an intellectual Jewish woman from New York who comes to an emotional awakening.

The night they spent together was not only a sexual, but also an emotional awakening, for the boy.

The two girls are nearly identical in appearance, but provide the poles of James's emotional awakening: Ella is impetuous and unreliable; Sarah is dour, the "prisoner of her own self-control."

Her playing is as pure and uncomplicated as Wright's scenario, which sidesteps any Freudian bear traps to focus on the emotional (and choreographic) awakening of a young girl on the cusp of adulthood.