Faced with her anger, Warren goes slack; he’s back where he started, feeling smaller than someone else’s problems. Directed by Mark Brokaw, the cast featured Josh Hamilton as Dennis, Mark Ruffalo as Warren, and Missy Yager as Jessica. It portrayed the life of lost stoner kids trying to learn how to function and hold healthy relationships - often failing.

This Is Our Youth | Theater in New York - Time Out This Is Our Youth | Theater in New York - Time Out

Dennis is an aimless, self-centered 22-year old who mercilessly belittles others and runs roughshod over their opinions and feelings. There’s the stolen cash, and a bag of coke shows up, but the real twist comes when Warren stands up for himself. This play puts a lot of focus on language (something I love and prefer anytime I read a play) and allows us to look at each character not for just how they present themselves to their peers, but also how they truly feel in this world.Indeed, in this one-room setting of a studio apartment piled under urban sprawl, the characters feel especially trapped in their adolescent angst of being all grown up with no place yet to go. Warren begins to realize the selfishness and weaknesses of his two companions and at play’s end is beginning to separate himself from the loathsome Dennis. The two potsmokers decide they need to get the money back, but Warren has already spent a sizable chunk of the cash.

This Is Our Youth - Wikipedia

His language is a New Yorker’s language: part Borscht Belt mock-incredulity, part survivor’s guilt and pride. A story about disaffected young people in the early 1980s, it opened Off-Broadway in 1996 with Mark Ruffalo in the lead role. Steppenwolf's revival of "This Is Our Youth," Kenneth Lonergan's 1996 play about disaffected rich kids in the Reagan era, might be re-titled (or marketed as) "These Are Your Parents.To me, we see the characters have slight perspective changes that’ll hopefully save them from themselves as they get older. At any rate, I am now sad that I'll probably never get to see Hamilton in the role (he's still damn good, but not quite 25 anymore). She keeps this revival fresh and electric, crackling with energy even as the stoned get more stoned.

This is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan | Goodreads

Whether it is in the 1982 setting or the 2014 Broadway context, Lonergan’s play seems bulletproof to age or dating. I could stretch out all the fat on my legs till they were long and slender and I’d go to swanky bars and smoke menthol cigarettes and I’d wrap my new legs round cocktail stools and I’d smooth myself all over with my delicate hands and I’d have my hair up so you could see my neck. Shapiro's superb direction - maybe the best work of her increasingly impressive Broadway career - Cera and his co-stars mine the material for every desired laugh, every interlude of pathos. A non-equity production directed by Serge Seiden was presented by Studio Theatre 2ndStage in Washington, DC from May 16 to June 30, 2002.Dennis makes arrangements to sell Warren's antique toys instead and leaves on that errand just as Jessica arrives at the apartment. Even though I was pretty excited about what happened last night, and also about like, maybe like, the prospect of like, I don’t know, like going out with you – Which I would be very into, if you were.