Pioneer Press review of "This Is Our Youth"

`Youth' produces funny, meaningful evening
 

THOMAS RUSSELL III SPECIAL TO THE PIONEER PRESS

Hidden Theatre's ``This is Our Youth'' at Theatre Garage is mostly a terrific evening of theater. To get that ``mostly'' out of the way, it's a play of two men and one woman, and author Kenneth Lonergan
seems fairly clueless about the woman.

Tracey Maloney tries gamely as Jessica, but seems fundamentally miscast for a girl described as ``cute.'' Maloney's Jessica is edgy, alert, intelligent, and prickly; she has original ideas and doesn't back
down from defending them. All admirable qualities, no doubt, but cute she's not.

Well, two out of three isn't bad, and playwright Lonergan, director Anneliese Christ, and actors Adam Whisner and Brad Goodrich make the male characters alive and contemporary. A comedy that's never very far from melancholy, even mortality, ``This is Our Youth'' explores the world of wealthy but troubled adolescents with rare complexity, clarity and skill.

The play has less a plot than a situation. Warren, warm, charming but a bit feckless, has stolen $15,000 from his father, and comes to crash with his friend Dennis. Because Warren seems to be a magnet for bad luck, crashing a football into Dennis' girlfriend's sculpture, and managing to waste $1,500 of cocaine without ingesting any, Dennis is not at all sure he wants him to stay.

The cocaine moment is a sight gag stolen from Woody Allen's ``Annie Hall,'' but because it gets the biggest laugh of the evening, we don't mind the theft.

Dennis is always on edge, always trying to be in charge. He shouts and swears at his girlfriend over the phone, but always seems to win her back. He lectures Warren on his inadequacies, although it's clear
they really are best friends. Lonergan's charting of the ins and outs, highs and lows of their friendship is the finest thing in the play.

One moment had me worried: We learn early on that Warren's sister was murdered by a vicious boyfriend. Was this going to be motivation with a capital ``M''? No. Like the psychiatrist's explanation at the end of ``Psycho,'' this only seems to explain things. The death turns out to tell more about Warren's dysfunctional parents than about him.

Lonergan is particularly sharp at dialogue. Maybe you had to be there, but in context, a character's description of his mother as ``like a bleeding heart dominatrix with, like, a hairdo,'' seems both convincing about mother, and exactly the way this character would talk. Lonergan manages to use the teen-aged banter both to define the characters' adolescence and to suggest precise feelings underneath.
Further, he understands how people get trapped into conversational positions they don't know how to get out of and don't understand how they got into. Warren gets pushed into offering a gift he clearly
does not mean.

On that level of observed dailiness, Lonergan scores a home run.

Watching Whisner and Goodrich, I simply couldn't imagine the roles done better. (Whisner is the only actor I've ever wanted to see as Salinger's ``Catcher in the Rye.'') Surely much of the credit must go to director Christ. A poignant and funny evening.