Malaise of privileged '80s 'Youth' recalled on Broadway
NEW YORK — It's morning in America, and longtime friends Warren Straub and Dennis Ziegler have the advantages of both youth and fabulously wealthy parents.
And they're lost and miserable.
That's the scenario laid out in This Is Our Youth, the bleak comedy that put playwright/screenwriter/director Kenneth Lonergan on the map in 1996. Though set in New York City — during the Reagan era, as alluded to — the play has thus far proven a bigger draw on the London stage, where a 2002 production featured such then-rising talent as Hayden Christensen, Jake Gyllenhaal, Colin Hanks and Anna Paquin.
The new revival (*** out of four stars) that opened Thursday at the Cort Theatre marks Youth's Broadway debut, and also that of all three of its stars: Canadian actor and musician Michael Cera, former child actor Kieran Culkin (who also appeared in Youth across the pond) and 18-year-old Rookie magazine founder/media prodigy Tavi Gevinson.
The eclectic group would seem to have a capable director in Anna D. Shapiro, whose credits include last season's starry, supple Of Mice and Men and 2007's ferociously virtuosic August: Osage County.
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. But she manages to mine the wry humor and pathos in Youth's portrait of privileged despair and spiritual malaise.
Cera plays Warren, a clumsy stoner who has just been kicked out of his father's Central Park West digs. He arrives at the nearby apartment of childhood buddy Dennis — a famous artist's son, and a drug dealer — with $15,000 in cash, lifted from a suitcase in Dad's room in a vengeful flourish.
Dennis starts berating Warren, as he has clearly always done. "This is like the prototype moronic move we've all come to expect from your corner," says the charismatic narcissist, who will repeatedly tout his genius as a businessman and in other pursuits. Cera's Warren gives him no argument; slouching slightly as he paces and speaking in a breathless monotone, the actor makes a convincing case for anyone who would leave this character alone at the lunch table.
But as the play progresses, we get hints of more delicacy and depth in Warren. A girl, not surprisingly, is the catalyst: Jessica Goldman, a pretty, opinionated student who ends up alone with him when Dennis dashes out to make a transaction.
Sadly, Gevinson, who plays Jessica, is the production's weak link. 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.
Still, under Shapiro's patient guidance, this Youth is intermittently funny and poignant — and provides a timely reminder that when our economy and culture are fractured, even the young and well-off suffer.