This Is Our Youth: Broadway Edition

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Michael Cera, making his New York stage debut, once again perfectly captures being an awkward man-boy, while veteran fashionista and acting newbie Tavi Gevinson matches his goofy nervous energy.

This Is Our Youth | play by Lonergan | Britannica

I mean, I was just walking down the street and they came up on me like they was important, and they start pushing me around, you know. All you’ll remember of your youth is a gray haze and my jokes,” Dennis cracks during one of his many takedowns at Warren’s expense. Culkin is sensational as Dennis, a talkative schemer whose occasional stumbles in no way impede his innate sense of self-confidence.The play takes place in Dennis Ziegler's family's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in March 1982. I also see clear connections between Lonergan and David Mamet--the great dialogue, the lost ainless characters mainly just talking, the exploration of "the present moment" and the swirl of ethical dilemmas. Some of the dialogue is overwrought and contradictory, the characters don't always act consistently or even in their own best interests. Warren stays behind to let the girls in, but a few minutes later, Jessica arrives alone, saying that they met Dennis downstairs, so Valerie went with him. This Is Our Youth” is a boy-centric piece; it’s narrower than Lonergan’s other work, but that serves to focus its passions and its poetry.

THIS IS OUR YOUTH By Kenneth Lonergan - Stage 32 THIS IS OUR YOUTH By Kenneth Lonergan - Stage 32

Jessica feels violated by Dennis’s words—for her, language is a wound that opens up other wounds—and she tells Warren so.She keeps this revival fresh and electric, crackling with energy even as the stoned get more stoned. Shapiro is more restricted here, working with a smaller, less practiced company on a play that, for all its appealing aspects, betrays both its age and the relative inexperience of its gifted creator. Dennis makes a plan to score some coke with some of Warren’s cash, then split it in a fashion benefitting Dennis. And yet, as the deceptively shaggy story unwinds in a single one-room crash pad, we don't just get to know these three privileged, directionless offspring of successful Upper West Side Jewish parents in 1982. Synopsis: Phil is a New Yorker who is an innocent, vulnerable, anxious and nervous self-dramatizer; he’s tired of not being taken seriously.

This Is Our Youth PDF | PDF - Scribd This Is Our Youth PDF | PDF - Scribd

Casting: Telsey + Company and Will Cantler, CSA; Press Representative: Phil As always with Lonergan, the murky-jerky inner worlds of his articulate, life-stalled characters drive the action. Cera has managed to appear both fetally unguarded and crushed by the weight of the world (a millennial Charlie Brown).A story about disaffected young people in the early 1980s, it opened Off-Broadway in 1996 with Mark Ruffalo in the lead role. Cera’s facial deadpan and vocal drone have the curious effect of deepening, not lessening, our sympathy for Warren.

This is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan | Goodreads

Unfortunately, what must have worked beautifully in the Steppenwolf's far more intimate environs doesn't fully register in the large house, making the play seem smaller than it really is. Indeed, when blood is shed in “Margaret,” we watch the victim less for the grim signs of her expiration than for what she says as she lies dying. There’s the stolen cash, and a bag of coke shows up, but the real twist comes when Warren stands up for himself. Cera and Culkin, both committed and eagerly expressive actors, make good use of that phone and cord. They have resources and no plans, no ambitions, and are in no way admirable (though in this production, a kind of looking back, there is some empathy for their being lost that I detect).

The "Arrested Development" star is genuinely funny and endearing, and if you've never seen him on-screen before, his Warren will be a revelation. Dennis lives alone in a flat paid for by parents who do not want him around, taking drugs and dealing them. So instead, I looked up the script and read it during school today (I like to read scripts of plays from pdfs at school, so sue me! And you stop speaking up in class—realize maybe you weren’t saying anything anyway—not something someone else couldn’t say better–usually a boy.