Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
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by Kenneth Lonergan, directed by Woody Harrelson
macIDeas, Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs, Toronto
September 22-October 18, 2003
"Values and Valuables"
"This is Our Youth" has opened the fall theatre season with a bang. It's the Toronto premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 play, a recent success in London's West End, and features three young Canadian actors under the direction of Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson. Though still rather rough and ready, the show deserves to be a success.
Lonergan is best known as the screenwriter and director of the indie film "You Can Count on Me" (2000). Only three months ago his "Lobby Hero" (2001) played on the same stage at Berkeley Street. What links these with "This is Our Youth" is a focus on people making moral decisions in a seemingly amoral world and the belief that people, no matter how chaotic their lives might be, have the capacity to change for the better.
"This is Our Youth" is set in March 1982 in Dennis Ziegler's apartment on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. Rather than go to university, Dennis has asked his wealthy parents to pay for his own place. He has been dealing drugs for five years and is a user himself, bursting with barely controlled aggression against everyone around him. Into his space steps his nerdy friend Warren Straub, who after a fight with his business tycoon father, has stolen $15,000 in cash from him. When Dennis is out to do a deal, Jessica Goldman, a girl Warren has had his eye on, drops by and their attempt to kill time till Dennis comes back leads to a sexual encounter.
Character, not plot, is what this play is about. These teenagers, all from wealthy, messed up families, try to play adult by playing mental and physical games with each other. They feign the indifference of "whatever" when in fact they are unable to cope with the confused emotions they feel. Gradually it beomes clear that they have each unconsciously patterned their behaviour on the parents they claim they hate. While the play is a funny-sad portrait of the so called "slacker" generation, it is also a critique of the characters' parents who abandoned the ideals of the 1960s for the accumulation of wealth. It is no accident that Lonergan shows that the three, espcially the collector Warren, treasure artefacts and music of the 1950s and '60s, a time both of their own innocence and their parents' social conscience.
Autobiographical in nature, this is Lonergan's first play and the scenes do have a tendancy to meander, showing none of the crispness of "Lobby Hero". Lonergan has reproduced teenspeak with amazingly accuracy, peppering lines with "like", "um" and "totally", snippets of school learning mixed in with vulgarity and the bluster of exaggeration. The one exception is Jessica, whom Lonergan gives fairly uncolloquial speeches, meant rather too obviously to be keys to the plays.
Harrelson has encouraged an improvisorial quality to the action and delivery that seems as naturalistic as it is messy. Given the highly physical performances he has asked for, it's no wonder that Fabrizio Filippo (Dennis) should have been injured in rehearsal. (Harrelson obtained from Lonergan himself a few lines to help explain Dennis's foot injury.) The opening night featured an unusual amount of unintentional falls, broken props and scenery.
Dennis is supposed to be charismatic and Filippo makes sure that he is, commanding the stage with vigour and bravado. Yet, Filippo reveals Dennis's flaws beneath the façade. His miniscule attention span, his overreactions, his mood swings all suggest all suggest that Dennis's life is spinning out of control. Soon we realize, as does Warren, that his "hero"'s life is empty and that he has a less firm grasp on reality than Warren does. As Dennis says of himself late in the play, "I am high on fear".
Marcello Cabezas gives an excellent performance as Warren that grows in power throughout the evening. We first view him as the clumsy, geeky nebbish as Dennis sees him. But gradually we see that Dennis's constant barrage of insults only makes Warren less secure. His suitcase full of childhood junk are actually collector's items and show that Warren had some sense, unlike Dennis, that there are things of value beside what can be bought and sold. Cabezas shows that passive as Warren may seem, he is constantly evaluating himself and those around him and finding he is not the idiot his best friend thinks he is.
As Jessica, Marya Delver has the least naturalistic dialogue to work with. Though Jessica is far more "together" than Warren or Dennis, Delver's level of intensity doesn't match that of Cabezas and Filippo as it should. Though she is on the right track, not only should she project her character with greater strength but also her voice.
Michael Gianfrancesco has designed the suitably grungy set and Lyon Smith the realistic sound. Tara Posluns has a good sense of the ordinary 1980s look and shows that Jessica may be studying design but hasn't graduated beyond simply colour coordination. Kimberly Purtell's lighting deliberately enhances the unpleasantness of Dennis apartment but softens in response to the abatement of characters' harsher emotions.
If Woody Harrelson's name brings a younger crowd to the theatre see this play, so much the better, because they will find a stage work that speaks to them on their own terms. But "This is Our Youth" has much to say to the older generation who created so callous a world while poorly equipping its children to cope with it.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-09-04.
Photo: Marcello Cabezas and Fabrizio Filippo. ©2003 Greg Tjepkema.
2003-09-24
This Is Our Youth