Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Youth, Reconsidered

This is Our Youth at the Cort Theatre
Kieran Culkin (L) and Michael Cera in This is Our Youth

            This is very important.
            Stop reading this review now.  If you’re at home on the computer, switch to another tab.  If you’re at work, go to the bathroom and do it on your phone.  If you’re lounging on the beach somewhere, get up and go somewhere you have access to a computer.
            You should—no, you must—immediately buy tickets to This is Our Youth at the Cort Theatre.
            The play, for starters, was written in 1996 by Kenneth Lonergan, who later wrote the screenplays to You Can Count on Me and Gangs of New York.  Set in 1982, it covers a two-day period in the life of three twenty-somethings who belong to a subset of yuppie culture—Upper West Side Jewish ne’er-do-wells whose parents fund their drug habits out of pure inertia.  It never feels dated or boring.  It’s red-hot from start to finish, replete with well-deployed comic affectation to match its deep and thought-provoking concepts of young life and death.  Mr. Lonergan is a master of playwriting, and this, the first Broadway production of his masterwork, is an opportunity to watch his words at work, guided by the always-capable director Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County) in a near-perfect world created by scenic designer Todd Rosenthal.
            Kieran Culkin is marvelously cast as a hard-living douchebag named Dennis Ziegler, the disappointing son of a cancer-ridden but still world-renowned painter.  Constantly spewing abuse at everyone around him, pausing to apologize, and then berating his companion for accepting his apology, Mr. Culkin’s total embodiment of the character is mesmerizing.  His natural likeability as an actor saves Dennis from veering into full-on villain territory, but his disregard for human frailty and never-ending vanity make him so much fun to hate.
            Relative newcomer Tavi Gevinson, an eighteen-year-old blogger and actress, plays Jessica Goldman, a neurotic anarcho-capitalist with a brash and entertaining sense of self.  Her performance is totally unique and inimitable, one of the best female turns on a Broadway stage in years.  Like the heroines of Hollywood’s classic screwball comedies, nobody in the audience can help but fall slightly in love with her by show’s end, and yet she’s not an empty shell or a viewpoint disguised as a character like many female leads of great recent plays.  She has inner thoughts and a complex ideology that can grate on her peers but always charms them, and in my mind, no one but Ms. Gevinson could have pulled off this two-sided act so masterfully.

            The down-on-his-luck dork head-over-heels for Jessica is Warren Staub, played in a show-stealing and history-making performance by—of all people—Michael Cera.  With this character, Mr. Cera singlehandedly escapes his seemingly unbreakable link to the line of mumbling milquetoasts he’s played throughout his career.  Here Mr. Cera has not just become Warren, he has created him—every tic, every movement, every reading is coordinated to full effect to bring a new version of this oft-attempted character to life.  (Warren has been played by, at various times, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, and Colin Hanks, among others.  After having seen Mr. Cera play the role, it’s near impossible to imagine anyone else.)  His back-and-forth with his two cast-mates is incredible--his rapport with Kieran Culkin is marvelous but expected, given their wonderful work together in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and his chemistry with Ms. Gevinson is potent and real.  Though Warren, the character, starts off a caricature, Mr. Lonergan pulls off one of the great character arcs in modern theater and turns Warren—with Mr. Cera’s help—into a wholly sympathetic character, one we root for and hope to see succeed.  Though he doesn’t, entirely (this is his youth, after all), one emerges from the theater with a sense of satisfaction and optimism that has been absent, at least for me, from much happier stories.  It doesn’t take long to realize why—this incredible cast and illustrious creative team has shown us definitively how to put on a great play.

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