All coked up, just like the Eighties

Robert Cushman National Post

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Warren (Marcello Cadezas) beats up on Dennis (Fabrizio Filippo) in a play directed by Woody Harrelson.

THIS IS OUR YOUTH

Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs

According to rumour, This Is Our Youth, a physically exciting and verbally brilliant piece by the American Kenneth Lonergan, is autobiographical. That figures; it was his debut play, and first-time dramatists, like first-time novelists, are traditionally expected to write about themselves. It would also explain an otherwise puzzling circumstance: A fresh and urgent play, that opened in New York in 1996, is actually set in 1982. Lonergan, the playwright, was a late starter. This was his youth.

It still feels contemporary, even after the further gap of the seven years the play has taken to reach Toronto. In fact, when the characters start bitching about the President, it comes as a shock to realize that they are talking about Reagan rather than George W. Bush. The play concerns kids with rich Manhattan parents who are devoting most of their post-high-school days to doing and dealing drugs. There may be fewer of these around now than there were in the indulgent '80s but there are some. Even when the characters, in retro mode, put on a record of Little Richard singing Tutti Frutti and start jiving to it, you know, then as now, they owe what knowledge they have of the steps to multiple viewings of Grease. You may be struck, only when the play is over, by the poignant fact that you have witnessed the end of the LP era. Only when I thought about it later did it strike me that I had been watching a stage full of adolescents minus computers -- though I had registered the related fact that, even though they say "like" a lot, they are, for professed drop-outs, remarkably articulate.

We meet Dennis, whose father has got rid of him by buying him a split-level apartment (well, the sleeping area is two steps up from the living room); and Warren, Dennis's long-time friend and hanger-on, whose father has simply got rid of him. Thrown out, Warren has helped himself to $15,000 of his dad's money and now turns up at Dennis's place. Dennis starts to devise complicated, constantly changing schemes by which the two can have a good time and still make enough of a profit selling coke to return the loot before Warren's father gets mad. Dennis, who in other respects fancies himself like crazy, lives in mortal fear of Warren's father getting mad; he considers Warren's father a dangerous gangster, though Warren apparently doesn't. Warren, whose general attitude toward Dennis is one of giggly subservience, goes along; though he is also tempted to do some big spending on a date with Jessica. Jessica, according to Dennis at least, is the first good-looking girl to show any interest in Warren in years. She is the only other character.

Woody Harrelson's direction is, at the start, almost excessively manic. It finds itself rapidly, though; the energy level is exhilarating in itself, and he knows how to vary it. Fabrizio Filippo, who plays Dennis, suffered a foot injury during rehearsals, but the resultant limp actually helps. It makes Dennis, whose rhythm is determined by whatever he happens to be on, seem more driven than ever, all hopped-skipped-and-jumped-up. He's a self-appointed golden boy, proud of his prowess with women (he demonstrates this by screaming abuse on the phone at his semi-estranged girlfriend), with clients and at sports. Constantly in motion, he maintains a punching bag in his apartment -- two punching bags, if you count Warren. Late in the play, reality hits him and he crumples; but it's reality seen on his own self-dramatizing terms. Filippo simultaneously arouses our pity for the character, our amused contempt for what the character's saying and our admiration for his own skill at delivering what amounts to a massive prose aria.

Marya Delver cleverly plays Jessica as a girl caught between convention and rebellion, which of course is another convention. She has a knack for delivering clichés ("I don't take advantage of the city's facilities, and it seems like a total waste") as if they were earnest truths, then catching herself doing it.

Marcello Cadezas, who was the driving force in assembling this production, has ironically cast himself as Warren, who is neither driving nor a force. In fact, and it may be the most clever thing about the play, Warren is two people. With Dennis, he's the addled loser his companion needs him to be. With Jessica, and even on the phone with his father, he's still nervous (watch the way Cadezas scratches his leg in moments of stress) he's thoughtful and even, sometimes, lucid. His two scenes with Jessica are elaborate rituals of approach and avoidance, beautifully outlined in both writing and performance. Warren's two halves come together when, emboldened by all he's gone through, he attacks, very sensibly and moderately, a few of Dennis's grosser illusions.

The play's flaw is it has no definable centre. Warren, the only character onstage throughout, is the protagonist by default, but Dennis has the flash, the charisma and the breakdown. As a group portrait, though, it doesn't quite work, since Dennis and Jessica barely connect. We are left with a cross between a genre painting and a jigsaw puzzle. That, though, is unlikely to spoil anybody's fun. The play's title, which suggests something out of the beatnik era, verges on self-parody; is it a boast, a rebuke or a take-it-or-leave-it declaration? The play turns out to be all three, tempered by humour and the merest dash of nostalgia. It has the zing of a Look Back in Anger, which was the granddaddy of all This Is Our Youth plays, minus the self-righteousness and with a better narrative.

This, give or take, is still our youth. Just as it always was.

Until Oct. 18. For box office info: 416-368-3110 or 416-872-1111.

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