In 1982, Ed Koch was mayor, you passed notes in class instead of texting, and the Upper West Side was an edgy neighborhood with blocks that weren't safe to walk at night.
Lots of things have changed since then. But one thing that hasn't is the angst of young people who are caught between the children they had been and the adults they have yet to become.
That's the malaise at the heart of "This Is Our Youth," now playing in a taut revival on Broadway. Kenneth Lonergan's drama set in 1982 portrays what happens one weekend after Warren (a delightful, nuanced Michael Cera) drops by a friend's Upper West Side studio apartment with $15,000 he stole from his no-good father. He tries to use the money to buy friendship from Dennis — who's a bully, though in Kieran Culkin's hands, a sympathetic one — and attention from his crush Jessica (the charismatic up-and-comer blogger Tavi Gevinson).
Playwright Lonergan has an ear for dialogue, so his three characters speak the way young adults actually do. They zigzag between passionate, ideological certainty and a desperate need to be liked, between cocky indifference and raw vulnerability.
But it is director Anna D. Shapiro — who also directed "August: Osage County" on Broadway — who brings out both the humor and the buzzing physicality of the play. She makes all of the unsaid emotion clear and external. Warren is uncomfortable in his skin, for instance, and Cera shows it by keeping him in constant motion in the first act, climbing over chairs, throwing a football, fidgeting. When Warren reveals a secret to Jessica, they hold hands across a table and then release them; hold and then release. It's a beautiful, visual metaphor for their desire to emotionally connect — and their fear of actually doing so.
Shapiro also gives the actors room to have long silences. We can see them thinking, sizing each other up, warring with themselves over whether it's better to be honest or slick. In those silences, we can see them trying to figure out what kind of adult they want to be.
