Desperate Fledglings, Flung From the Nest ‘This Is Our Youth’ Stars Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson
Ben BrantleySeptember 11, 2014: Just watch these bodies in motion: loping, flying, dancing, vamping and writhing at an altitude known only to the permanently high and perpetually crashing. The acrobatics being performed in Anna D. Shapiro’s sensational, kinetically charged revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, which opened on Thursday night in a marijuana haze at the Cort Theater, aren’t anything like those you’d find at the Cirque du Soleil. But they’re every bit as compelling, and probably (painfully) a whole lot closer to your own experience. As brought to thin-skinned, full-blooded life by Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson, the three privileged and desperate young characters in Mr. Lonergan’s 1996 play exist in a state of unending free fall. And a studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — designed by Todd Rosenthal with an awareness of the big city beyond — starts to seem as vast and scary as outer space. You may remember that this is what it feels like to be on the cusp of adulthood with a whole wide world waiting to eat you up. Though first performed nearly two decades ago, and set in the early 1980s, This Is Our Youth hasn’t dated in the usual way of portraits of bright and sullen young things banging their heads against the walls of a society that doesn’t understand them. That’s because for all its period-specific references, Mr. Lonergan never relies merely on surface details to define his characters’ uncomfortable place in time.
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