Possibly the ultimate coming-of-age drama. The play follows a group of high-school friends in Victorian-age Germany who begin to experience their first sexual desires in a world where even talking about sex is taboo. Each struggles to travel the route from childhood to adulthood without a roadmap. Along the way they touch the heights of elation and the depths of despair while being forced to confront the problems of lust, sadism, masochism, rape, abortion, and homosexuality. Some survive the journey, others do not. Funny and horrifying by turns, the play explores the budding of those basic drives that make us who we are.