This Is Our Youth: Broadway Edition

Product Information

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. Summer Phoenix hits all the right notes as nervy fashion student Jessica, and Matt Damon is horribly authentic as the cocky Dennis who fancies himself as a wheeler dealer.

This Is Our Youth | Theatre | The Guardian This Is Our Youth | Theatre | The Guardian

Friends Cera and Culkin more or less willed this revival into being with an assist from the director Anna D Shapiro, an ensemble member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, where the production originated. The drifters know there’s more than monied ennui going on; they do suspect they might be their own worst enemies. Transferred to the Cort’s proscenium stage, with a set by Todd Rosenthal that makes it look like something out of the old TV series “Naked City,” “This Is Our Youth” has lost some of its intimacy.Though still hewing to drama school rules – small cast, single set, neat inciting incident – it has a mature, post-grad voice, sensitive and humane and jammed full of totally splendid crackerjack-with-a-toy-surprise dialogue. You can sense she’s working to feel all of Jessica’s fragility and insecurity and fervor, but the effort tenses her body and voice. Jessica doesn’t feel that she can trust Warren after he’s revealed their affair, but whom can she trust? he digs so far into the character's drugged-out disappointment you see only the shadows of it rippling the surface. Afraid of Warren's father and the armed men he will likely send after the missing money, Dennis demands that Warren get out, but Warren has nowhere else to go.

This is Our Youth | Theatre | The Guardian

I get scared as hell, man, walking down around here, I mean, I can’t protect myself or nothing, man. not that we always did such clean, happy shows, but I'm just saying that my cries to do Bogosian's "SubUrbia" fell on similarly deaf ears. So now she’s gonna talk to Dennis and I’m gonna look like a total liar to someone I’m just starting to be close friends with and who I really care about! Taking place over 24 hours of very hard growing up, this sometimes funny comedy charts mixed up Warren's fumblings with mixed up Jessica, his slow realisation that Dennis is more foe than friend, and the moment when Dennis's life reaches that fork in the forest. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers.okay i watched an online production of the play so i'm counting it (esp because i had the play open in another tab and kept referring to it because i'm just like that). Squirming and shouting her lines in a high-pitched whine that suggests barely repressed hysteria, she overplays Jessica's feigned confidence and confusion, making Warren's enduring attraction to her less convincing.

This Is Our Youth” | The New Yorker A Revival of “This Is Our Youth” | The New Yorker

All three are highly talented, instantly beguiling young actors even if Lonergan's study of subsidised social rebels leaves you wanting more. I’d have cocktails and white wine out of bottles with special dates on them in tall glasses that were all dewy with cold and I’d smile a lot.

This is Cera’s third production in the play, and his comfort with this eternally uncomfortable material makes for riveting agony on stage. Shapiro (who directed both productions) staged it in the round; the setting was so intimate that you could almost feel the actors vibrating with Lonergan’s words and imagination. On closer inspection, it’s a moving and shrewdly humorous tale about two friends in 1980s New York who are terrified of life and loss in the big, cold world. I know Kenneth Lonergan through some great films such as Manchester by the Sea but never read or saw a production of this play, which was said to define (yet another) lost generation of young people. Nonme of them have anything going for them except they are privileged rich white kids, and yet the dialogue is terrific, often funny, occasionally touching.

This Is Our Youth Review | Den of Geek This Is Our Youth Review | Den of Geek

No wonder the kids are killing each other over postcodes, or getting sick at the thought of not being famous. This is Our Youth in London, stage play by Kenneth Lonergan starring Chris Klein, Freddie Prinze Jr and Heather Burns - theatre information and tickets". Having already played roomies and strained best friends in the millennial touchstone Scott Pilgrim vs. Dennis, the alpha, is abusive, caustic, violent and a crappy friend -- and yet, you absolutely care about him, because Culkin makes him human. not much happens (it spans only 48 hours) but also so much happens – amended: enough happens that the plot moves but it doesn't feel overambitious.I’m remembering how we cared about each other, how we got in fights for each other and robbed Tescos and built fires and got off our faces, it was exciting, wasn’t it? The first Lonergan play I've read and it has only gone further to confirm my suspicion that he is a genius after he's released three masterpieces in a row with You Can Count On Me, Margaret, and Manchester-by-the-Sea. Until then, I guess I'm just glad I actually know what I'm talking about when I say things aren't as good as This Is Our Youth. Then you go after your friend’s boyfriend because it’s wrong and it’s fun and because your friend is pretty. You do, you think that anything you do to me is okay, and anything I do is fucked because I’m not using the right words.