This is Our Youth

This Is Our Youth is a play by Kenneth Lonergan. Originally produced by The New Group, it opened at the INTAR Theatre in New York City in October 1996. It later opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theatre in November 1998. It was directed by Mark Brokaw, with Mark Rosenthal as Dennis, Mark Ruffalo as Warren, and Missy Yager as Jessica. It later played popularly for some time in London's West End and was revived Off-Broadway in 2001.

The play has become very popular among the younger theater generation for its edgy issues and modern themes. It has seen its fair share of popular film actors in its roles, many of them in their first stage role. Featuring Hayden Christensen, Matt Damon, Colin Hanks, and Chris Klein as Dennis, Jake Gyllenhaal, Casey Affleck, Kieran Culkin, and Freddie Prinze Jr. as Warren, and Anna Paquin, Summer Phoenix, Alison Lohman, Heather Burns as Jessica.

Plot

The play takes place in Dennis Ziegler's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in March 1982. Dennis's friend Warren Straub, a dejected 19-year-old, has just been kicked out of his house and stolen $15,000 from his abusive lingerie-tycoon father. Dennis, the more wily and domineering of the two, spends some of the money on cocaine, hoping to sell it to a friend of his for much more. Jessica Goldman, an "anxiously insightful" fashion student, comes over and Warren hopes that he can use the money to entice her into bed.

The play explores timeless issues of adolescence and maturity, as well as the Reagan Era in which it takes place: the characters feel adrift in a country that now rejects the 1960s-style liberalism that they were brought up to believe in.