Theater - This Is Our Youth

April 20–23, 2005

This page is part of an ongoing project to document the history of the theatre productions performed at Wabash College.  If you have information not included on this page, please contact the Theater Department or Professor Dwight Watson (watsond@wabash.edu).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Set on Manhattan's Upper West Side, This Is Our Youth follows 48 hours in the lives of three very lost young souls. Kenneth Lonergan’s award-winning play is a lacerating, meticulous, and hilarious snapshot of the simmering moment between adolescence and adulthood. The play takes place in Dennis Ziegler's apartment in March 1982. Dennis's friend Warren Straub, a dejected 19-year-old, has just been kicked out of his house and stolen $15,000 from his abusive lingerie-tycoon father. Dennis spends some of the money on cocaine, hoping to sell it to a friend of his for much more. Jessica Goldman, an "anxiously insightful" fashion student, comes over and Warren hopes that he can use the money to entice her into bed.  The play explores timeless issues of adolescence and maturity, as well as the Reagan Era in which it takes place: the characters feel adrift in a country that now rejects the 1960s-style liberalism that they were brought up to believe in.

 

The New York Times says, "In a season in which some of the wise men of the theater have been trying to force-feed insipid fare…to young audiences, it’s sheer relief to celebrate the return of a rambunctious and witty play about wayward teenagers and post-adolescents that doesn't turn youthful travails into plastic rap—This Is Our Youth—by turns caustic, cruel, and compassionate—is the real real world."

 

 

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