"Set in 1982 at the dawn of the Reagan era, Kenneth Lonergan's first play depicts forty-eight hours in the lives of Dennis, Warren and Jessica - three rich and bored middle-class teenagers from New York's Upper West Side.
Caught up in the new yuppie culture (for which money, power and success are all), they have stolen $15,000 from their parents without much of an idea of what to do with it. So, without a care for the consequences, they blow it all on a reckless, hedonistic spending spree!
This is Our Youth is a tragicomic portrayal of youth on the brink of adulthood and reveals the ache at the heart of the slacker generation.
From: http://www.albemarle-london.com/thisisouryouth.html
"...[The cast] can all cut it on stage, in a play which hilariously and heart-catchingly captures that moment when adolescents find themselves, confused and incredulous, on the threshold of adulthood. The year is 1982, when Lonergan was about the same age as his characters, two of them 19, the other 21. Reagan was in the White House, Thatcher was in Number 10, and all the fuzzy, druggy, but not entirely contemptible idealism of the Sixties appeared to have been consigned to the garbage can of history.
Not that you would necessarily guess it from watching Lonergan's poor little rich kids, idling away the best years of their lives with prodigious quantities of marijuana, the occasional cocaine binge and records by Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart. But the times they are a-changing. Christensen's Dennis (in whose heroically squalid studio flat in Manhattan all the action takes place) may have a poster of Che Guevara on his wall and use a picture of Reagan as a darts board, but he can calculate the profits of a drug deal with lightning speed and exploits and bullies his best friend Warren (Gyllenhaal).
And right now poor Warren, a rumpled 19-year-old whose lingerie tycoon of a father beats him, and whose sister was murdered when he was 10, needs help. His dad has thrown him out and Warren has lifted 15 grand from his dad's briefcase. Will Dennis help him recoup his losses? And will Warren, eternally unlucky, manage to go all the way with Jessica (Paquin)?
Not a lot happens in the play's two hours and most of what does is bad, but then you could say the same of Waiting For Godot. What keeps you hooked is Lonergan's ability to get under the skin of his characters.
But I don't want to make the piece sound excessively solemn. It is full of delicious humour, with Lonergan nailing the excruciating rites of adolescent passage. Just the sight of Warren's awkward dancing and over-eager snogging reduced me to tears of laughter and poignant recognition of my own distant youth.
Anyone who has ever smoked a joint or kissed anyone will love This Is Our Youth.
From: http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=%2Farts%2F2002%2F03%2F18%2Fbtyouth18.xml
"For This Is Our Youth, he creates a tale of young desires and vulnerability played out through three Jewish New Yorkers who are funny and likeable, but also naïve and destructive.
Christensen plays Dennis, a control freak and small-time drug dealer whose father, a famous artist, bought him the apartment where the action takes place.
He cannot resist walking all over Warren, played by Gyllenhaal, Dennis's downtrodden and dopey if well-meaning friend who turns up at his door after being kicked out by his abusive father.
Warren helped himself to $15,000 (£10,500) of his dad's money on his way out, and Dennis persuades him to return it before it is missed - but not before using it to do a few cocaine deals.
Paquin appears as Jessica, the kooky object of Warren's affections who turns out to be just as messed up by her family as the other two are.
It is a sign of quality that a play so serious and contemplative is also so funny.
Lonergan's incisive writing sheds light on the absurdity of that strange ailment, the human condition.
As well as exploring the gaping canyons and gorges of the characters' flaws, the script also uncovers their humorous quirks and foibles.
Much is made of the fact that the play is set in 1982 - but if it were not for a poster of Ronald Reagan that is used as a dartboard, the play could have been about three young New Yorkers at any time during the last 20 years.
But the time-frame does make you wonder what would have become of Dennis, Warren and Jessica, who would have been middle-aged by 2002.
One thing is for sure - they would not have been living happily ever after."
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/reviews/newsid_1879000/1879755.stm
"The title sounds like a jaunty showcase - a Twenties Cochrane revue or a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie. But the slice of young adulthood under the microscope in Kenneth Lonergan's very funny play This Is Our Youth is that of poor-little-rich-kids on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
The dateline is 1982, at the start of the Reagan era, which spelt the end of the liberalism that had - officially, at least - informed their upbringing, leaving this bunch adrift and floundering.
Watching Laurence Boswell's assured London premiere - which boasts a trio of hip young American movie actors, who make the transition to the stage with enormous aplomb - you may occasionally feel that these youths form a rather recherche anthropological group for a British audience to be examining right now. But, on the whole, the show disarms you with its wit and its beguiling mix of beady-eyed hilarity and compassion.
Taking place over 48 hours, the action is set in the cruddy pillbox apartment of Dennis Ziegler, the domineering, drug-dealing star of his circle, whose bravado is complicated by a lovely underlying delicacy and sensitivity in the excellent performance of the rangy, Jagger-lipped Hayden Christensen.
The catalyst is the arrival of his buddy, Warren (a delectably clumsy and sympathetic Jake Gyllenhaal), who has left home with $15,000 stolen from his lingerie-tycoon father. We could have been in for a tight Mamet- esque drama as Dennis tries to get a quick return on the money via drugs and as Warren uses the rest to lure Anna Paquin's wonderfully uptight and gabbling Jessica to a night of sin at a ruinously expensive hotel. But Lonergan's play has the patience to relax into some beautifully observed and quietly riotous sequences.
The pleasures are abundant. Listen to the way Christensen drawls the word "bru-uu-uu-nch" in a way that indicates the conflict between distaste and nostalgia for the lifestyle it denotes. Or consider Warren's brilliantly ham-fisted chatting-up technique. Discovering that Jessica is into smoking, he sweet-talks her with: "Yeah... I never really got into the whole cigarette scene myself.... But I hear great things about it."
Lonergan is a dramatist first and a diagnostician second. The intriguing sidelights thrown on the offstage parents suggest that not everything can be blamed on what has caused the shift to the new Reagan ethos. This Is Our Youth admirably refuses to become anything so obvious as a preachy tract."
From: http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020329000868&query=This+Is+Our+Youth
"Lonergan looks back in languor, and with a certain rueful irony, at the generation that emerged at the time of the Reagan presidency. The period is March 1982. And the setting is a one-room apartment on New York's Upper West Side occupied by the drug-dealing, domineering Dennis. But the action stems from the arrival of his chum, Warren, who comes bearing $15,000 he has stolen from his self-made father who has thrown him out of the house. The wily Dennis spends part of the money on cocaine, aiming to get a brisk return on his borrowed capital: the more wimpish Warren hopes that his new-found liquidity will help him entice fashion student Jessica into bed.
As a portrait of a generation of instinctive drifters, Lonergan's play is often very funny. Dennis and Warren fall naturally into a bully-and-victim pattern that disguises a genuine friendship. But the best scenes are those where Warren is left alone with the argumentative, irony-free Jessica. Their preliminary sexual fencing has a wonderfully touching clumsiness. Even better is their morning-after spat when Jessica's post-coital anger and Warren's bumbling helplessness kill any chance of a relationship.
In purely behavioural terms, the play is dead accurate, and Lonergan is not slow to point out that these are all the kids of rich parents who themselves lead pretty messed-up lives. What Lonergan leaves out, however, is the question of whether the Reagan ethos is partly responsible for all this moral confusion. We learn that Dennis's social-worker mother is full of raging impotence at the new economics. But the fame of Dennis's painter-father, and the brutishness of Warren's, seem unconnected to the zeitgeist; and, likeable as the play is, it fails to go the final mile in indissolubly linking private and public lives."
From: http://www.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,3604,669297,00.html
"Set in Reagan's America, and featuring a trio of well-to-do, browned-off, under-employed and over-drugged teenagers, Kenneth Lonergan's vivacious first play touches on the casualties of narcotics and on the dilemmas of early loves - but it is, refreshingly, neither the snapshot of an era, nor a coming-of-age drama. This Is Our Youth, niftily directed by Laurence Boswell, is an on-the-wing, quick-on-its-feet response to the fluidity of adolescent personality.
At one moment a boy is playing football inside the apartment like a six-year-old; at the next, he's arranging orgies in the Plaza. Sometimes all three are forcefully articulate; sometimes bumbling. Each is in turn ferociously obsessive and languid to the point of torpor. Sometimes they are friends; sometimes not. It's the flaring and subsiding of the dialogue which drives the action, remaking each character from one minute to the next.
From: http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,672789,00.html
"...Dennis is none too pleased that Warren has turned up at his flat with this stolen money. He can foresee Warren being forgiven by his father, whilst he will be the drug-dealing villain left carrying the blame. Dennis therefore comes up with ingenious, but illegal ways to replace the stolen money that Warren has already spent. This way Warren can return home with the stolen money and be reconciled with his Father. Dennis also sets up Warren with a ‘date’ with Jessica, whom Warren has desires for.
...Lonergan does not delve into the real reasons the characters behave as they do. Why does Warren deliberately choose to annoy his father? Warren’s sister was murdered, but how does this relate to his problems? Why is he totally in love with the hat his grandma gave him? Why did he leave home with his toy collection that he loves so dearly, but then is so easily persuaded by Dennis to sell it? Why does he allow Dennis to boss him around and humiliate him? Why is he friendly with Dennis in the first place, as they don’t seem to have anything in common? Maybe it’s because Dennis is the only person that has paid any attention to him? Why is Dennis so alienated? The only clue we are given is that he is infuriated with his mother because she is a famous artist."
From: http://www.londontheatre.co.uk/londontheatre/reviews/thisisouryouth02.htm
(the above is not from a professional reviewer, but from an audience member.)
"Here's a sensational, old recipe for playwriting, artfully cooked up by American author Kenneth Lonergan to appeal to those under 25 who are hooked by the subject of teenage rebels and mind-changing substances. First Lonergan sets up a Manhattan studio apartment. He makes it look tousled and hip, with a poster of Che Guevara and an aroma of cannabis cigarettes, smoked by Dennis, who's a cool, young dope-dealer in quarrelsome trouble with his girl.
Then Lonergan stirs in spicy ingredients, letting them simmer over-long: Dennis's geeky friend, Warren, arrives with $15,000 in a money bag, stolen from his crook-father; attractive Jessica turns up later and proves not averse to a little light inter-course. A one-ounce mound of well-ground cocaine is drizzled into the melting pot and sizzles. Gradually Lonergan blends virginal Warren and tentative Jessica together, using stolen cash, champagne and witty lines, until they come to the boil - out of sight. Finally, he mixes Warren and Dennis together, giving their relationship a new shape, though leaving the play without much body.
Lonergan, who wrote and directed that terrific film about family relations You Can Count on Me, encourages more cynicism than admiration with this inert piece, magnificently acted by three American film stars. This is Our Youth belongs to that tired genre in which rich, slackly-parented American kids, turn nonchalantly criminal, not to mention drug-crazy, in their late, mixedup teens. It's set during Reagan's presidency: records of Frank Zappa and the Rolling Stones lie around Dennis's cramped apartment, but there's no particularising sense of period and its politics.
The comic plot, dependent upon joyful use of stolen money and ingenious attempts to speculate with it, does lay sensible stress upon the dangers of drug-excess. But thin threads of plot are stretched to tearing-point in the play's short span. There's an astute, funny sex scene in which Jake Gyllenhaal, a lumbering, puppyish and poignant Warren ends up bedding Anna Paquin's argumentative, nervy Jessica and emerges a new man. By so doing, he inexplicably breaks the sadistic hold that manipulative Dennis has over him and inexplicably shifts the dynamics of their friendship. Film star Hayden Christensen's Dennis, all lean, loping and comic, fires the evening. He's absolutely riveting as a smooth-talking, exploiter and reeks of menace, narcissism and vulnerability in one fell swoop.
From: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/hottx/theatre/review.html?in_review_id=508106&in_review_text_id=491252
"His 1996 This is Our Youth focuses on three 20-year-olds living off their parents’ wealth on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1982. Dennis deals drugs but mostly gets high in his parentally subsidised apartment, which he’s made a student dive complete with empty fridge and a Che Guevara poster on the wall.
His friend Warren shows up, having run away from home with $15,000 that he’s stolen from his abusive rag-trade father, as well as a suitcase full of “collectible” toys that he hopes to sell. While Dennis tries to be reconciled with his girlfriend, Warren hangs out with her friend, the self-absorbed fashion student Jessica.
That is basically it in terms of plot. The young men amusingly apply their drug-blown minds to schemes to replace some of the stolen money that Warren has already spent. The hapless Warren keeps spending more in pursuit of a night of passion with Jessica. “Right now you’re a rich little pot-smoking burnt-out rebel,” she says, “but ten years from now you’ll be a plastic surgeon.”
Confusion about the present and future loom large. Looming is the closest that this apartment-bound play gets to action. Lonergan gives us two hours of conversation, but it seldom palls. It captures the paralysis of a generation of post-adolescents not ready to enter adulthood who have seen their baby-boomer parents trade liberal ideals for easy money in the greed-is-good 1980s.
The play sometimes suffers from the aimlessness that plagues the characters, particularly in the second half, but its strength lies in the characterisation, amusing dialogue and offbeat scenes. A trivial conversation between Warren and Dennis, in which both constantly answer “nothing” to each other’s questions, amuses without sounding sitcom-false.
Later, an awkward grappling between the would-be lovers Warren and Jessica is interrupted when she has to remove a hair from her mouth. It’s an unexpectedly funny and endearing moment, one of many as Lonergan lets us get to know his characters.
Laurence Boswell’s strong production brings the feckless youths to entertaining life, courtesy of three hot young names from Hollywood: Anna Paquin, Hayden Christensen and Jake Gyllenhaal. The prickly courtship between Paquin’s Jessica and Gyllenhaal’s Warren is the most involving part of the evening. They play their shortlived romance with an anxiety, defensiveness and neediness that is affecting and sweetly comic.
The central relationship between Warren and Dennis is less well-defined, partly because Christensen’s bullying Dennis is occasionally stuck in a Brando broodiness. Yet Gyllenhaal makes the hopelessly confused Warren strangely loveable. He’s touching, too, especially when his “whatever” attitude melts away to reveal something broken inside. It’s an impressive stage debut in a play that’s funny, moving and beautifully written.
From: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,685-238056,00.html
