The revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 1996 play, This is our Youth, by the Steppenwolf Company, now on Broadway, starts, pre-curtain, with some awful moaning music (a term I use advisedly) as an intro to this exposition of the lives of drug-infested, drop-out losers, supposedly in 1982, but to me it felt more like 70s. The piece is enthusiastically played by a dynamic Kieran Culkin as a troubled drug dealer, Michael Cera as a lost young man who has stolen $15,000 from his father, and the vivid young Tavi Gevinson as a girl explorer who (we find out) can dance, on a great four-level set by Todd Rosenthal depicting an apartment building (the upper three floors used, basically, to show time of day via fine lighting by Brian MacDevitt).
The play starts with moronic interaction between the two guys, revealing no intellect, no insights. When Gevinson arrives, there is a shift, and they all reveal intellectual insights and accumulated knowledge that suggest an education, though this step forward is offset by behavior between the men that resembles arrested development at age nine (fight choreography by Thomas Schall). As actual depths are revealed, the play becomes more interesting, and Lonergan’s counterpoints of viewpoint hold us, as does the Woody Allen-style cocaine mishap. Director Anna D. Shapiro’s sharp timing brings this period piece, which echoes today, to life.
