'This Is Our Youth' Stars Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson
Just watch these bodies in motion: loping, flying, dancing, vamping and writhing at an altitude known only to the permanently high and perpetually crashing.
The acrobatics being performed in Anna D. Shapiro's sensational, kinetically charged revival of Kenneth Lonergan's 'This Is Our Youth,' which opened on Thursday night in a marijuana haze at the Cort Theater, aren't anything like those you'd find at the Cirque du Soleil. But they're every bit as compelling, and probably (painfully) a whole lot closer to your own experience.
As brought to thin-skinned, full-blooded life by Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson, the three privileged and desperate young characters in Mr. Lonergan's 1996 play exist in a state of unending free fall. And a studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan - designed by Todd Rosenthal with an awareness of the big city beyond - starts to seem as vast and scary as outer space.
You may remember that this is what it feels like to be on the cusp of adulthood with a whole wide world waiting to eat you up.
Interactive Feature: Fall Arts Preview - Times 100Though first performed nearly two decades ago, and set in the early 1980s, 'This Is Our Youth' hasn't dated in the usual way of portraits of bright and sullen young things banging their heads against the walls of a society that doesn't understand them. That's because for all its period-specific references, Mr. Lonergan never relies merely on surface details to define his characters' uncomfortable place in time.
What he captures so beautifully, in this work that made his name as a playwright, is the sense of being lost, formless and on your own that descends as adolescence comes to an end and every feeling seems to contradict itself. And he translates that emotional chaos into dialogue that is as tellingly rhythmic as that of David Mamet but that sounds a lot more spontaneous.
'It's like my instinct is just broken,' says Jessica Goldman, the 18-year-old fashion student played by Ms. Gevinson (the precocious 18-year-old fashion blogger, moonlighting here as an astonishingly assured actress). The same sentiment is surely shared by the other characters onstage.
Granted, one of them, the swaggering, dope-dealing Dennis Ziegler (Mr. Culkin), in whose apartment the play is set, might officially beg to differ. On the other hand, Warren Straub (Mr. Cera), Dennis's best friend and whipping boy, makes no pretense of knowing what he's doing or where he's headed, and there's a sad, liberating certainty in the admission.
The first time I met Dennis and Warren, they were being portrayed by Josh Hamilton and Mark Ruffalo in a New Group production Off Broadway, with Missy Yager as Jessica. They all made such an impression on me, especially Mr. Ruffalo as a sad sack stitched into shape by hemp, that 18 years later, my memories of them initially threatened to crowd out this latest cast, which has a much bigger stage to fill.
But Ms. Shapiro, who oversaw the angry fireworks of Tracy Letts's 'August: Osage County' and Stephen Adly Guirgis's 'The ________ With the Hat,' knows how to scale up intimate confrontations to Broadway dimensions without losing nuance. Under her direction, 'Youth' becomes more explosively physical than I recalled it, a ballet of gracefully clumsy collisions.
And Mr. Cera, Mr. Culkin and Ms. Gevinson imprint highly legible and individual signatures onto their characters, in ways that extend into every inch of their postures. Whether they're dancing or hurtling toward one another like comets sprung from their orbits, or tossing a football (and wrecking the joint in the process), these kids are achingly self-conscious in deliciously distinctive style. The characters, I mean, not the people playing them.
The story, which flows as easily and foamily as tap beer for the play's first three-quarters, suggests a cross between one of Mr. Mamet's tales of hapless connivers and J. D. Salinger's studies of sensitive kids in revolt against adult phoniness. Freshly evicted from his own home, Warren shows up chez Dennis one night, with a bag full of stolen money. (It's his dad's, it turns out.)
How are they going to spend it, and then (self-preservation asserting itself) how are they going to make that money back, so they can return it? Drugs figure in these calculations, both to be consumed and trafficked in, as does Warren's collection of 1950s and '60s memorabilia. So does the prospect of getting Warren in bed with a girl and thus ending what Dennis calls a 'stupefying losing streak.' Hence the arrival of the unwitting Jessica, a sort-of friend of Dennis's girlfriend.
This description suggests more in the way of structured plot than 'Youth' possesses. What drives and shapes the play is the energy of its characters' feeling - and psyching - one another out. They're groping to connect, but also always wary of the dangers of bona fide human contact.
It's not just the dope that keeps them at a remove from reality. They've all grown up in fractured, intellectually steeped New York households, and they're wary of sounding like clichés. There is deliberate, wary artifice in how they talk. But their messy emotional metabolisms keep undermining them.
Each cast member keeps these conflicting elements in skillful, ambivalent balance. Mr. Culkin, who played Warren in London 11 years ago, here becomes a funny and appropriately irritating alpha narcissist, whose will to rule borders on psychopathic. You can imagine every move Dennis makes being reflected in the hall of mirrors of his mind. Ms. Gevinson nails exactly the aggressive defensiveness of a girl who sees boys as both the enemy and salvation.
Mr. Cera, best known for his film and television work ('Juno,' 'Arrested Development'), achieves something remarkable here: the sense of an amorphous being assuming and losing shape in the course of roughly 12 hours. All lanky limbs in search of a stance, his Warren reminds you of the adolescent agony of not quite knowing who you are while being smart enough to know that you don't know.
Warren is a damaged soul, for reasons that emerge by degrees as the play continues. So are, in less radical ways, Dennis and Jessica. And in the play's second (and lesser) act, Mr. Lonergan spells out the ways in which these characters are the products of warping parents. When that happens, especially when Dennis and Warren deliver big 'life with dad' monologues, 'Youth' loses some of its magic.
Up to that point, this play trusts its audience to discern the social patterns that makes these people who they are. We can infer the past that informs their present, especially when the cast is as gifted and spot on as this one. Then suddenly, it's as if someone had told Mr. Lonergan, 'But you can't end this thing without telling us what it means,' and he obliged.
Such appended analysis is entirely unnecessary. Yet it doesn't dilute the painful pleasure of what precedes it or the lingering, exquisite memory of these awkward, lovably unlovable creatures pondering forlornly how they might remember the way they were.
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