Alienated Youth
Warren Straub and Dennis Zeigler aren’t the kind of nice boys Jewish mothers compel their daughters to find. On the surface, they might be considered catches — they’re from well-to-do families and live in Manhattan. But their assets are veiled in a fog of pot smoke. As played by Chris Wright and Christian Middleton in Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, Warren and Dennis look up to one another, but they’re practicing anti-hero worship.
When they’re not dealing drugs, they’re lying around watching TV or tossing a football in Dennis’ apartment. When Warren asks, “What’s up?” — which Dennis accuses him of doing every five minutes — the only answer is “Not much.” That begins to change one Saturday afternoon, when Jessica Goldman (Laura Christine) shows up with Dennis’ (offstage) girlfriend. She and Dennis take off to buy some cocaine, leaving Warren with the young woman for whom he’s had a jones from afar.
In their friends’ absence, Warren invites Jessica to spend the night at the Plaza Hotel. Temporarily in possession of a lot of cash he’s stolen from his father, Warren thinks the Plaza will seal the seduction. The second act opens at noon the next day. Dennis is still hopped up from a night of eightballs. Warren returns to tell his friend about his success, followed by Jessica, who says she can’t have brunch. Curtain.
That’s pretty much the play, one lacking much in the way of interesting characters or emotional depth. Warren and Dennis are shallow to begin with, but then so were the brothers in Sam Shepard’s brilliant True West. The closest Lonergan comes to pricking a thought is when Jessica muses philosophically that the adult you become is the youth you were. One could argue that’s sometimes true — but that’s beyond the script. There’s no explanation here for why the play was a long-running hit Off-Broadway or a draw in London’s West End for such stars as Matt Damon and Anna Pacquin. For a truer example of Lonergan’s ample talent, rent You Can Count on Me or take in his play Lobby Hero next spring at the Unicorn Theatre.
This cast is as young and attractive as the text demands, and Wright is quite good with his combination of nervous energy and puppy-dog enthusiasm upon Jessica’s arrival. Middleton, pulling double duty as set designer, has liberally peppered the stage with Playboy magazines, fast-food wrappers and Chinese take-out boxes. It’s apt clutter for a chaotic youth on the brink of an ambiguous adulthood.
Not one to discourage any new theater ventures (especially in a month crammed with seasonal fare), I was taken aback by the sloppiness surrounding this gig. In its preshow press release, the Madrid said it was presenting Lonergan’s “Oscar nominated play,” which is an impossibility even in an industry insatiable for awards. (Plays aren’t nominated for Oscars.) Then, at the Sunday afternoon performance, a Madrid staffer met me at the door to say that what I was about to see was “a run-through,” and the only seating available was in the balcony. She said they didn’t expect much of an audience because of the Chiefs game. But later I overheard her say that a party was booked in the downstairs area for later that evening, and she was “too lazy” to amend the seating situation. It was remarkably dismissive of a cast that did what it could to bring Lonergan’s moribund play any life at all.
