Event

This Is Our Youth

THIS IS OUR YOUTH by Kenneth Lonergan

directed by Dannie Snyder for Punchkin Repertory Theatre

About the play:

In 1982, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the wealthy, articulate pot-smoking teenagers who were small children in the '60s have emerged as young adults in a country that has just resoundingly rejected everything they were brought up to believe in. The very last wave of New York City's '60s-style Liberalism has come of ageand there's nowhere left to go. In meticulous, hilarious, and agonizing detail. THIS IS OUR YOUTH follows forty-eight hours of three very lost young souls in the big city at the dawn of the Reagan Era: Warren Straub, a dejected nineteen-year-old who steals fifteen thousand dollars from his abusive lingerie-tycoon father; Dennis Ziegler, the charismatic domineering drug-dealing friend who helps him put the money to good use; and Jessica Goldman, the anxiously insightful young woman Warren yearns for.

Funny, painful, and compassionate, THIS IS OUR YOUTH is a living snapshot of the moment between adolescence and adulthood when many young people first go out into the world on their own, armed only with the ideas and techniques they developed as teenagersideas and techniques far more sophisticated than their parents ever realize, and far less effectual than they themselves can possibly imagine.

This is Our Youth consists of one awkward moment after another, the characters struggling with the "things" that they hate about themselves. Each character is hiding something and pretending to be something, afraid of everything that created them and the thing that they are becoming.

OUR CAST:

Eric Austin (Dennis Ziegler)

Clint Harris (Warren Straub)

Hannah Burkhauser (Jessica Goldman)

There is smoking of tobacco products on stage.

Please do not park at Joe's Bakery across the street from the theatre, your car will be towed. There is street parking and a small gravel parking lot at one end of the theatre building.

"This Is Our Youth" is presented by special arrangement with Dramatists Play Service, Inc., New York.