Kenneth Lonergan’s first major theatrical success was This is Our Youth, which opened off-Broadway in 1996 and just had an acclaimed Broadway revival this year. So Warehouse Theatre Company’s second production in their revived series (after an almost ten year hiatus) is riding a wave of interest and couldn’t come at a better time, and I’m happy to report that their production retains much of its brazen power and heart.
This is Our Youth opens with Dennis Ziegler, played by an antic John Connor, watching late night television in his wrecked Upper West Side apartment in March 1982, when his friend Warren Straub (Jesse Massaro) blows in like an ill wind, bringing chaos and weighted down with desperation and frenzy. Ominously carrying a suitcase, Warren’s been thrown out of his father’s house with all of the possessions he cared to keep – all tchotchkes (records, action figures, a toaster) but no clothes or toiletries, nothing to equip him for living in the world, except the $15,000 he’s stolen from his father.
Soon, Warren and Dennis are spinning childish schemes that take on a grim, desperate edge. The way your friend says, “What if we bought some heroin?” at 19, like it makes all the sense in the world when neither of you do heroin. Childish schemes like hookers and cocaine and Dom Perignon. When Dennis leaves to procure the aforementioned Dom and coke, Jessica Goldman (Erin Mellon) appears, and the second half of the first act is Warren and her feeling each other out in nervous, argumentative flirtation (including putting on Frank Zappa’s “Heavenly Bank Account” as a means of seduction). Finally, they tether their mismatched loneliness to each other in a shaky orbit.
If the first act is the nervous anticipation before the party, when sex and drugs and nerves are humming, the second act is the hangover. Even worse, it’s the truth hangover. And the shame hangover. The pacing in this second half modulates to fit the rhythms of this hangover – languid and throbbing, then like the air being slowly let out of a balloon.
At its heart, much of this play is about male friendship. Boy-friendship often has an ugly Darwinian aspect where someone’s tagged as the patsy, the screw-up, the charity case, the person it’s easy to needle mercilessly – while hiding your own insecurity in bravado and machismo – because of course everyone knows that guy’s the punchline. It’s clear that Warren is that person in his circle, and it never lets the audience forget the nagging question of whether Warren keeps screwing up because he’s screwing up or if that vicious cycle is fed by their treatment of him. The sequences between Dennis and Warren were uncomfortable to watch, they so closely reminded me of ways I’d mistreated people I loved, and the dialogue is as close to the way humans really talk to one another as you’re likely to ever see in a play.
The play isn’t just about the ugly side of male camaraderie. It’s also about the horror that adulthood and death will come upon you without warning and all your justifications will ring hollow. It’s about the way we don’t know who will come to our funeral and it won’t matter to us anyway, but it sure seems to matter while we’re alive. It’s about the intersections of privilege and how they’ll cushion and corrupt you. It’s about standing on the precipice as the world starts to come apart. It packs a lot of density and a lot of impact in its two hour running time.
When This is Our Youth is performed, often Warren is played by someone gangly and slumped. In Jesse Massaro’s approach, the nervousness and the grief are closer to the surface; he plays him as a ball of barely controlled, vibrating rage. The performance is so physical it knocks you back against the chair, the moments when he becomes still are heartbreaking and hard to take your eyes off. It’s a masterful look at someone so shell-shocked by the world and baffled by circumstance that he’s terrified of breaking things, or maybe breaking things again. It’s hard not to see him blaming himself for his sister’s death, his parents’ divorce, his father hitting him, and because those things are written into every gesture he makes, it’s uncomfortable to watch him slowly realize there isn’t much chance of things getting better; there’s a cycle going on and he might not be strong enough to break it.
Erin Mellon’s take on Jessica is perfectly in tune with someone closer to having a grip on life than the two boys but still worried about letting people down. There are some unlikely choices from her, especially early on, in striking the right balance between flirtation and judgement, and it’s possibly a little too jittery, but at the same time, a kid of the character’s age is going to overshoot, to judge too harshly, to misstep. As the first act goes on she eases into this melange, and in the final minutes she’s on stage the combination of bafflement and sadness and not knowing what she wants is heartbreaking. Anyone who lived through their 20s with some of their memory intact knows exactly why neither she nor Warren know what happened and why they won’t for a long time.
John Connor’s Dennis is the least interesting character on stage, too one-note unlikable, and the character’s animal magnetism and athleticism feel forced; everything feels like a deliberate choice. But there are moments when Connor shines, as in a cocaine soliloquy to the ceiling near the very end of the play.
This is Our Youth is structured like a dance: Warren and Dennis’s peacocking and chest-beating followed by Warren’s tentative pursuit of Jessica in the first act; an uneasy shift in confidence and power between Warren and Dennis in the beginning of the second; then a brief, shaky trio; a long, masterful solo from Warren; and Dennis’s return in a hollowed-out mirror of the beginning.
The weak moments are largely technical. The set looks more like a Columbus campus apartment than an Upper West Side studio. The comic books scattered around are too glossy; they’re ‘90s comic books. There’s an early sequence when Warren is displaying his records, clearly described as “from the 1960s,” and Dennis says, “Where did you get this? It’s an amazing album,” but the album is Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues, which came out two years before the play is set. I had a hard time believing two 19-year-old boys would talk that way about a popular record that came out when they were in high school.
However, after I got past those moments that undercut the verisimilitude, this play carried me away. A horror-comedy in a more realistic sense than those words are often used together, with real laughs and genuine dread. A job well done and more than worth braving the cold.
This is Our Youth runs from January 8 through January 17, 2015, at MadLab Theatre and Gallery, 227 N Third St, Columbus, Ohio. Performances are at 8:00pm Thursday-Saturday with 2:00pm and 7:00pm performances on Sunday January 11. For more information and tickets go to WarehouseTheatre.org.