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