This is our Youth

Step out on Brisbane’s lower Edward Street these days and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d been beamed up on Broadway, dropped on a steamy sidewalk somewhere near the Iridium Club. There’s a new basement Jazz bar, 24/7 kebab kiosk, and late-night coffee. And it’s all staggering distance from the Metro Arts Theatre, a hub of the city’s thriving community arts scene, including Underground Broadway’s current micro-run of This is our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan.

Now best known for his Oscar-winning screenplay for Manchester by the Sea, in 1996 Lonergan was staging This is our Youth off Broadway. And this production, in the wonderfully worn, former warehouse that is Metro Arts, is reminiscent of such a setting.

The action takes place in a New York City studio apartment. It’s 1982 and the beginning of the Reagan era. The focus is a lopsided friendship between two self-absorbed young men, physically mature, yet mentally barely stretching to adolescence. Thankfully there is a girl – the girl that one of the boys is hoping to spend the night with – preferably in the penthouse suite at the Plaza Hotel (now owned by Donald J Trump – coincidence?).

Lonergan’s male protagonists are verbally prolific yet emotionally inarticulate. As 80s brats they have one advantage – money. That’s because one of them has stolen $15,000 from his father, who may have earned it through business associations with gangsters, but who cares when your best mate earns by dealing drugs to your so-called friends? Money is their language, their entertainment and their absolver. But what happens when actions have so few repercussions?  

As Director Tim Hill puts it, after the Weinstein scandal, “the characters who run amok in 1982 would now be in their late 50s and part of that very same privileged group … suddenly the central question of the play becomes what is the consequence of a lack of consequences?”

Normally at the helm of musical theatre, Hill proves he can steer with ease from Times Square glitz to edgy off-Broadway angst. And he certainly encourages winning performances from his young cast of talented performers.

This cast comes together as a perfect storm – seasoned by a background of childhood and recent professional experience, backed by a cross-section of study at our State’s and National top acting courses. They are writers, musicians and acting teachers. They are also friends whose work has intersected at various times, in Shakespeare and stage musicals. This production adds drama and dark comedy to their creative arsenal.

As perpetual loser, Warren Straub, actor Jackson McGovern is no longer a sunny Bundy boy from North Queensland – he embodies Buscemi-like menace, nervously drawn to his future but unsure of how to release the ballast of his albeit damaged childhood, as symbolised by his tattered suitcase of 60s pop culture memorabilia. He starts out playing a kind of Chester the Terrier to Mark Hill’s Spike the Bulldog schoolyard hero, adored for his confidence and bravado. But as events unfold, things could take a turn and McGovern shows he can cut it in a darker role.

Fresh from NIDA but already a seasoned performer, Mark Hill’s Dennis Ziegler is like an American Psycho played by a coked-up Michael J Fox – wired to a circuit going nowhere and blissfully unaware of how hilarious he is. Saving us from the brink of aggressive boy’s banter, Bellatrix Scott sails in as Jessica Goldman and just about steals the show. A recent QUT graduate, Scott displays the confidence and comic chops of a much more experienced performer. She would be at home in a Woody Allen film. 

I wasn’t surprised to read that This is our Youth started life as a one-act short that the writer later extended: it shows. While the first act fizzes and pops with witty and off-the-wall dialogue, the second act script slides – Lonergan would probably defend the lack of steam as realistic to the play’s era – but this cast remains undeterred.

Underground Broadway usually deals in the musical side of Broadway. I asked Producer Spencer Bignell why the foray to off-Broadway drama? The simple answer is: timing – these creative mates all had a brief window available in their busy schedules and wanted to work together.

Thank goodness spaces like Metro Arts still exist to cater for this type of hot-house production. Fittingly the space was founded in the late 1970s to encourage cross-fertilisation of ideas and expertise.

The timing for this creative collective is a bonus for Brisbane audiences. This is our Youth is only on for a few days. My advice is to catch this cast before they all scarper out of town – you’ll be able to say you saw them first before their names appear in lights very soon.

Beth Keehn