Post by Techguy on Sept 30, 2006 14:52:25 GMT -5
theater2.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/theater/reviews/29subu.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1159630331-a9imOom6EW6RJg6C/OZMyg
Bogosian’s Youthful Rage and Alienation, Retrofitted for BlackBerries
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: September 29, 2006
How do you like your losers? Sunny side up or burned to a crisp? The all-American failure has been reclaiming the entertainment spotlight lately from the usual beat-the-odds winners, especially in movie comedies, whether winsome (“Little Miss Sunshine”) or raunchy (“Clerks II”).
But if you feel that to be young, restless and on a dark road to nowhere is no laughing matter, you can always visit the dead-end kids in the black-hole revival of Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia,” which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater.
Granted, they’re not a whole lot of fun, despite being embodied by some of the brightest young performers in town, including Gaby Hoffmann and Kieran Culkin. But even if you’re as success-addicted as Donald Trump, you’re likely to find yourself identifying with many of these characters on at least one level. They’re beyond caring what happens to them, and the odds are you will be too.
This is one of those plays, British and American, that have come along at regular intervals since the mid-20th century to locate the rottenness of a society in the aimless rage of its young adults. The spitting granddaddy of ’em all is John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” (1957), which was followed by works in which anger’s energy gave way to brutal apathy and inertia: Edward Bond’s “Saved,” David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth” and too many plays to count by Neil LaBute.
Such plays tend to inspire theater critics to heated adjectives that often begin with “s”: scalding, scabrous, scandalous, shocking and (finally, breathlessly) significant. Certainly these adjectives were trotted out when “subUrbia” first opened at Lincoln Center in 1994 and again two years later, when a film version was released, directed by Richard Linklater, a specialist in youthful disaffection and disorientation.
In its current reincarnation, directed by Jo Bonney, “subUrbia” clearly shows the hallmarks of the subgenre it belongs to: a cast of prematurely defeated characters in their early 20’s, dehumanizing sex, dehumanizing insults, a throbbing sense of imminent violence and assorted forms of substance abuse that both delay and propel the central action.
Despite being inspired by Mr. Bogosian’s memories of growing up in suburban Massachusetts, “subUrbia” feels generic to the point of abstraction. The newly added topical props, music and references (to iPods, BlackBerries, Web sites, “The Da Vinci Code”) only confirm the feeling that “subUrbia” is set in some faceless Angstville, U.S.A., a sense further underlined by Richard Hoover’s sterile set, centered on a detailed replica of a 7-Eleven-type convenience store.
This prototypical quality may be intentional. But the updated accessories and allusions hang from the play as if hastily pasted on, and you never credit them as cultural forces of disaffection. More important, this production only rarely summons the essential desperate energy that can make works about angry young things frighteningly irresistible.
Set in the resonantly named town of Burnfield (how scorched was my valley), “subUrbia” is a portrait of one bleak night, both typical and eventful, on the sidewalk in front of the store, where a group of bored friends kill time for hours on end. The possibility that they might kill themselves as well is never far away.
None of these folks have much in the way of lives to call their own, though they do have the invisible character labels common to group portraits onstage. Jeff (Daniel Eric Gold), who has whittled his academic pursuits to one course at his local community college, is the Philosopher; his best friend, Tim (Peter Scanavino), a Navy veteran, is the Combustible Alcoholic, and Buff (Mr. Culkin), a stoner skateboarder, is the Cut-Up. (Think of Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”) Jeff’s girlfriend, Sooze (Ms. Hoffmann), is the Artistic One (and most likely to escape from her hellhole of a hometown), while Sooze’s chum, Bee-Bee (Halley Feiffer) is the Quiet One, which means pay close attention to her, since no one else will.
Stirring up this habitually sluggish mix is the arrival of Pony (Michael Esper), a former classmate who has become a minor rock star, and his hard-smiling public relations woman, Erica (Jessica Capshaw). The manifold bad behavior of this crew — which includes vomiting, urinating, hurling trash, playing loud music and disrobing — is viewed with disapproval by Norman and Pakeesa (Manu Narayan and Diksha Basu), the enterprising Pakistani immigrants who run the store.
Mr. Bogosian made his name as a confrontational monologist of urban anomie with shows like “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead.” (His “Talk Radio” is to be revived on Broadway later this season.) He is a master of invective, and he generously distributes his insults (all unprintable here) among his characters. The cast members clearly enjoy hurling the dirty disses, which they do without overplaying, a particular mercy in dramas of disaffection.
But since many of the lines could be redistributed among the cast without anyone noticing the difference, the burden is shifted disproportionately to the performers to make individuals of their characters. Ms. Hoffmann, a standout in Wendy Wasserstein’s “Third” last season, finds a lovely range of shades of warmth and weariness in a young woman struggling against a gravitational pull of defeatism. And the energetic Mr. Culkin and the vulpine Ms. Capshaw invest stock types with deliciously observed detail and insight.
Mr. Scanavino, a memorable presence in “Shining City” on Broadway last spring, never locates the menace that is essential to his character (and would make the show’s best-written scene, a nasty seduction, fly). And Mr. Gold’s Jeff is less an invigoratingly angry young man than a merely whiny one.
Ms. Bonney, who is married to Mr. Bogosian, has done splendidly with relaxed, organic ensemble work in revivals of “The Fifth of July” and “A Soldier’s Play.” But she needs to take a more active and explicit hand here.
“Look at us,” Jeff says, in an 11 o’clock moment of revelation. “We all dress the same, we all talk the same, we all watch the same TV. No one’s really different, even if they think they’re different.”
Point taken. But unless you believe that these people are indeed discrete individuals, with histories and feelings all their own, watching them is like sitting with a squirming, un-house-broken litter of puppies for two hours. Except puppies, of course, are cuter.
Bogosian’s Youthful Rage and Alienation, Retrofitted for BlackBerries
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: September 29, 2006
How do you like your losers? Sunny side up or burned to a crisp? The all-American failure has been reclaiming the entertainment spotlight lately from the usual beat-the-odds winners, especially in movie comedies, whether winsome (“Little Miss Sunshine”) or raunchy (“Clerks II”).
But if you feel that to be young, restless and on a dark road to nowhere is no laughing matter, you can always visit the dead-end kids in the black-hole revival of Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia,” which opened last night at the Second Stage Theater.
Granted, they’re not a whole lot of fun, despite being embodied by some of the brightest young performers in town, including Gaby Hoffmann and Kieran Culkin. But even if you’re as success-addicted as Donald Trump, you’re likely to find yourself identifying with many of these characters on at least one level. They’re beyond caring what happens to them, and the odds are you will be too.
This is one of those plays, British and American, that have come along at regular intervals since the mid-20th century to locate the rottenness of a society in the aimless rage of its young adults. The spitting granddaddy of ’em all is John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” (1957), which was followed by works in which anger’s energy gave way to brutal apathy and inertia: Edward Bond’s “Saved,” David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth” and too many plays to count by Neil LaBute.
Such plays tend to inspire theater critics to heated adjectives that often begin with “s”: scalding, scabrous, scandalous, shocking and (finally, breathlessly) significant. Certainly these adjectives were trotted out when “subUrbia” first opened at Lincoln Center in 1994 and again two years later, when a film version was released, directed by Richard Linklater, a specialist in youthful disaffection and disorientation.
In its current reincarnation, directed by Jo Bonney, “subUrbia” clearly shows the hallmarks of the subgenre it belongs to: a cast of prematurely defeated characters in their early 20’s, dehumanizing sex, dehumanizing insults, a throbbing sense of imminent violence and assorted forms of substance abuse that both delay and propel the central action.
Despite being inspired by Mr. Bogosian’s memories of growing up in suburban Massachusetts, “subUrbia” feels generic to the point of abstraction. The newly added topical props, music and references (to iPods, BlackBerries, Web sites, “The Da Vinci Code”) only confirm the feeling that “subUrbia” is set in some faceless Angstville, U.S.A., a sense further underlined by Richard Hoover’s sterile set, centered on a detailed replica of a 7-Eleven-type convenience store.
This prototypical quality may be intentional. But the updated accessories and allusions hang from the play as if hastily pasted on, and you never credit them as cultural forces of disaffection. More important, this production only rarely summons the essential desperate energy that can make works about angry young things frighteningly irresistible.
Set in the resonantly named town of Burnfield (how scorched was my valley), “subUrbia” is a portrait of one bleak night, both typical and eventful, on the sidewalk in front of the store, where a group of bored friends kill time for hours on end. The possibility that they might kill themselves as well is never far away.
None of these folks have much in the way of lives to call their own, though they do have the invisible character labels common to group portraits onstage. Jeff (Daniel Eric Gold), who has whittled his academic pursuits to one course at his local community college, is the Philosopher; his best friend, Tim (Peter Scanavino), a Navy veteran, is the Combustible Alcoholic, and Buff (Mr. Culkin), a stoner skateboarder, is the Cut-Up. (Think of Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”) Jeff’s girlfriend, Sooze (Ms. Hoffmann), is the Artistic One (and most likely to escape from her hellhole of a hometown), while Sooze’s chum, Bee-Bee (Halley Feiffer) is the Quiet One, which means pay close attention to her, since no one else will.
Stirring up this habitually sluggish mix is the arrival of Pony (Michael Esper), a former classmate who has become a minor rock star, and his hard-smiling public relations woman, Erica (Jessica Capshaw). The manifold bad behavior of this crew — which includes vomiting, urinating, hurling trash, playing loud music and disrobing — is viewed with disapproval by Norman and Pakeesa (Manu Narayan and Diksha Basu), the enterprising Pakistani immigrants who run the store.
Mr. Bogosian made his name as a confrontational monologist of urban anomie with shows like “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll” and “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead.” (His “Talk Radio” is to be revived on Broadway later this season.) He is a master of invective, and he generously distributes his insults (all unprintable here) among his characters. The cast members clearly enjoy hurling the dirty disses, which they do without overplaying, a particular mercy in dramas of disaffection.
But since many of the lines could be redistributed among the cast without anyone noticing the difference, the burden is shifted disproportionately to the performers to make individuals of their characters. Ms. Hoffmann, a standout in Wendy Wasserstein’s “Third” last season, finds a lovely range of shades of warmth and weariness in a young woman struggling against a gravitational pull of defeatism. And the energetic Mr. Culkin and the vulpine Ms. Capshaw invest stock types with deliciously observed detail and insight.
Mr. Scanavino, a memorable presence in “Shining City” on Broadway last spring, never locates the menace that is essential to his character (and would make the show’s best-written scene, a nasty seduction, fly). And Mr. Gold’s Jeff is less an invigoratingly angry young man than a merely whiny one.
Ms. Bonney, who is married to Mr. Bogosian, has done splendidly with relaxed, organic ensemble work in revivals of “The Fifth of July” and “A Soldier’s Play.” But she needs to take a more active and explicit hand here.
“Look at us,” Jeff says, in an 11 o’clock moment of revelation. “We all dress the same, we all talk the same, we all watch the same TV. No one’s really different, even if they think they’re different.”
Point taken. But unless you believe that these people are indeed discrete individuals, with histories and feelings all their own, watching them is like sitting with a squirming, un-house-broken litter of puppies for two hours. Except puppies, of course, are cuter.
Patrick Roy, 2006 inductee into the Hockey Hall of Fame