Monday, November 16, 2009

This is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonnergan

Theatre historians often define major movements in theatre historiography with the lens of hindsight. However, there seems to be a trend over the last 10 years of plays that are particularly Gen X in content and expression. This is Our Youth, a three-person play by Kenneth Lonnergan being presented by Gamut Productions at the BCA, is one of those plays that helps define this generation. Sure, it may not have the Pulitzer cred of Rent or the critical appeal of Red Light Winter, but This is Our Youth could certainly be credited as the Gen X’s Death of a Salesman.
The plot can roughly be described as three Gen X youth living in New York City in 1982. However, as the patron sitting to my left noticed, “This doesn’t have to be set in the 80’s. This could be anytime after 1969.” The story is of two friends, Warren and Dennis, the former is a drug peddler whose parents pay for his rent and the latter is a boomerang child who decides to retaliate by stealing money from his father. Enter Jessica, the FIT student with whom Dennis is infatuated. However, Dennis’ plans to bed this beauty are interrupted by the woman’s intellect, perspicacity, and willingness to challenge the status quo. All three characters become involved in a drug scheme, sexual rendezvous, and the inability to communicate their true emotions which, essentially, is the tragic flaw of these unheroic heroes.
On the surface, the play is about masculine friendship and identity, the drug culture, Gen X, and love. Digging slightly deeper, you realize this play is actually an analysis of the Gen X mentality. Dennis brings with him a suitcase full of antique toys – a symbol of the legacy the Boomer generation left to their children. The question remains, “How do Gen Xer’s make sense out of the legacy they were given by the turbulent 60s?” When Warren returns from selling the merchandise for a fraction of its “worth,” we see the legacy deteriorate. The play spins economic theory, mass mis-communication, and honest human emotion into a tangled web where communication is incomprehensible.
The play is conflicting because at times, one wonders how these characters so involved in drugs can express themselves so lucidly and yet mis-communicate their feelings and emotions so poorly. However, it is brilliant in that it captures the ethos of the Gen X sentimentality. It is one of those plays where you feel that research must be done in frat houses dormitories and drug cartel’s to truly capture the voice of these characters.
This production, though lacking in special effects and professional suavity, definitely captured the essence of the piece with all its discomfort and awkward miscommunication. Jonathon Popp as Dennis portrays a doped-up, sleazy, manipulator that harkens the very spirit of David Mamet, Sam Shephard, and Sean Penn all at once. He seems not only made for this performance but to be giving the performance of his lifetime. Steven Rossignol as Warren displays moments of brilliance, mostly in the presence of the other actors,but one definitely gets the sense that he has real acting chops behind the moribund demeanor. Chelsea Cipolla as the lone female definitely portrays a character whose well-grounded and back-boned – a difficult achievement given the patriarchal tone of the piece.
Although the play is well acted and well directed, one can’t help but notice the white, straight, heterosexist hegemony reified by the play’s themes and content. It’s almost as if the author wants the audience to empathize with the white, straight, middle-class whiney bastards who soak up their trust funds while piddling away their lives as some sort of Greek tragedy. As entertaining and enlightening as this show is into the Gen X aesthetic, it should most be analyzed in terms of its reification of the capitalist system and the way Gen X considers the economy as part of our identification and expression of a contemporary Lost Generation.

Third by Wendy Wasserstein

It is a tradition in regional theatre that when an artistic director is going to resign or retire, s/he will opt to produce King Lear. Therefore, it is most befitting that in Wendy Wasserstein’s final play Third, this grand dame of the regional theatre should choose this work as her inspiration. Perhaps it is serendipity or perhaps Wasserstein, who died from cancer last year, saw this as her swan song. Whatever the reason, it provides an interesting bookend to an impressive career, though a play not without its faults and limitations.

In the way that her popular hit Sisters Rosenzweig updated Chekhov’s Three Sisters to 1980s Manhattan, this play modernizes Lear into a New England university where a liberal product-of-the-sixties English instructor is challenged by a Midwestern white, middle-class male – the seeming antithesis of the professor’s “liberal” education. At the heart of the story is the instructor’s accusation that the boy plagiarized his essay on King Lear – a rather pertinent topic given the fact that Wasserstein herself is plagiarizing Shakespeare, who some consider the greatest plagiarer of all. The rest of the plot seems quite perfunctory unless one is a university professor, Shakespeare aficionado, or theatre critic who will enjoy comparing the plot and characters of Shakespeare’s tragedy to this one. The professor has two daughters both of whom represent Goneril and Cordelia while the student represents Regan, the good child. The instructor’s father also makes a brief appearance representing the end-of-act-III Lear as an old man afflicted with Alzheimer’s. A scene on a streetcorner in a rainstorm provides a pivotal moment that maybe lost on anyone who is not familiar with the original work.

Devotees of Ms. Wasserstein’s work will find bits of her uncanny dialogue and character creation, not the least of which is the character of Dr. Gordon. This character seems to solely encompass the wit, wisdom, and spunk for which Wasserstein is known. The fact that this character is battling cancer, the ailment that took Wasserstein’s life, makes her that much more powerful and appreciated. Wasserstein seemed to infuse this character alone with her signature wryness and style. You can see the playwright’s personality come through this character as she fights for her own life while pointing out the triviality in the plights of the characters around her. Perhaps Dr. Gordon was conceived as the fool from Lear who, despite his ignorance possesses great knowledge for the king. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore that this character maybe Wasserstein herself putting into perspective the trivialities that she dramatized so well in other works.

Unfortunately, the play comes off a bit too pedantic and after-school-special to be considered one of Wasserstein’s magnum opuses. Fellow audience members around me couldn’t help but draw parallels to Mamet’s Oleanna and Rebecca Gilman’s acerbic Spinning into Butter, works that have tackled similar themes with far more combustible content. However, I find this work to be a requiem not just for Ms. Wasserstein’s life and ouvre, but for the era of psychologist-couch realism for which she was writing. Wasserstein provided a voice for the Baby Boom generation educated in the sixties and wrestling with the society they helped to create. In this work, Wasserstein seems to be passing the torch to the next generation with a bit of trepidation, but an acknowledgement that it is time to move on.