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Analysis and discussion of characters in Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth.
- Critical Essays
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- Critical Overview
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Get ready to explore This Is Our Youth and its meaning. Our full analysis and study guide provides an even deeper dive with character analysis and quotes explained to help you discover the complexity and beauty of this book.
Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth is a brilliant, darkly humorous, bittersweet portrait of youth poised on the cusp of the scary, disillusioning path to adulthood.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
- Criticism
In 1993, the MET in New York City produced Kenneth Lonergan's one-act play "Betrayal by Everyone" during their festival of short plays. Lonergan then expanded the play and renamed it This Is Our Youth. The new version opened off Broadway in 1998 to rave reviews that continued when the play moved the following year to the Douglas FairbanksTheater on...
Kenneth Lonergan was born in New York City in 1963 to parents who were both psychiatrists. His father was also a retired doctor and medical researcher. Lonergan attended Walden School, a progressive private school in Manhattan, where he began writing in the ninth grade. His interest in playwriting was sparked when his drama teacher asked him to col...
Act 1
This Is Our Youthtakes place in Dennis Ziegler's one-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. It opens on a Saturday night in March, after midnight. His friend Warren appears at Dennis's door, lugging a large suitcase and a backpack. Dennis begins rolling a joint, after he discovers that Warren has brought some marijuana with him. Warren admits that his father has kicked him out because he smokes too much of it. Warren pulls two hundred dollars out of his backpack...
Act 2
In the early afternoon of the next day, Warren arrives at Dennis's apartment. Dennis tells him that he got the cocaine and that Valerie stormed out after she saw her broken statue. When Dennis asks what happened with Jessica, Warren says that they had sex at the Plaza. Dennis says that the Plaza is a dump and that they should have gone to the Pierre instead. Warren is worried that Jessica was too quiet before she left in the morning. When Warren says that he spent about a thousand dollars for...
Jessica Goldman
Nineteen-year-old Jessica Goldman is a "cheerful but very nervous girl" who displays "a watchful defensiveness that sweeps away anything that might threaten to dislodge her, including her own chances at happiness and the opportunity of gaining a wider perspective on the world." She uses this defensiveness to help her project her own image of herself as a hip, intelligent, independent young woman who cannot be taken advantage of, yet her actions suggest that she is not as self-assured as she a...
Warren Straub
Warren is "a strange barking-dog of a kid" who finds himself in a great deal of trouble at the beginning of the play. After he steals his father's money, he turns to the only person he can; unfortunately, that is Dennis, who continually makes him feel like a loser. Although that description fits Warren in many respects, he has more thoughtfulness and "a dogged self-possession" that gives him more authenticity than his friends exhibit. Unlike his friends, Warren understands that he is wasting...
Valerie
We never meet Valerie, Dennis's girlfriend, but Dennis speaks to her on the phone. Her function in the play is to reinforce Dennis's character flaws, specifically, his inability to control his anger and his self-centeredness. He screams at her when she voices anger at the fact that Warren has broken the sculpture she made for Dennis, never acknowledging to her the time and effort that she put into it. She also helps generate conflict for Jessica, who has to admit to Warren that she lied to Va...
Coming of Age
All three main characters are on the brink of adulthood but are having difficulties with the transition. They have been living in a state of stasis, supported by their wealthy parents, who demand only that their children leave them alone. None of them has been forced to examine his or her empty life or to determine the future. Their days are spent thinking only about how they can fulfill their immediate desires: drugs, alcohol, and sex. Only Warren shows any development toward maturation, as...
Identity
Each of the main characters must find a clear sense of identity in order to make the transition into adulthood. The two who appear to have accomplished this are Dennis and Jessica, yet during the course of the play, they reveal the illusory nature of their images of self. While Warren has not established a firm sense of his own self by the end of the play, he has been able to see the true nature of those around him, which suggests that he will then eventually be able to gain a clearer vision...
Lonergan's dialogue in the play has been praised for its realism. Write your own dialogue of a conversation between you and a friend that reveals an important quality of your friendship.Read J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye and compare the depiction of a teenager in 1950s America with the depiction of young people in the early 1980s in This Is Our Youth. Are the strug...Imagine what might have happened to Warren after the end of the play. Would he have given his father back the money and reconciled with him? Would he have continued his friendship with Dennis? Writ...Interview four people who have experienced death in their families. Take notes, focusing on the effect of death on the family members. Report your findings to the class and lead a discussion, askin...Dialogue-Driven Plot
The plot advances through dialogue rather than action, which occurs offstage. The dialogue reinforces the sense of the characters' self-absorption, especially in the case of Dennis, who pays little attention to what the others are saying. This occurs most notably at the end of the play, when Warren has just delivered a heartfelt monologue about his father's reaction to his sister's death. Dennis's response to Warren's question about his father being "totally by himself" is "I guess," followed...
Symbols
The sparse setting becomes an important symbol in the play, which takes place entirely in Dennis's studio apartment, an appropriately confined space for the limited lives of the two main characters, Dennis and Warren. Only three characters appear in the play; three others are spoken to by Dennis and Warren on the phone, but Lonergan does not include their words, which reflects and underscores the self-centeredness of the main characters. The dominant symbol in the play, however, is Warren's s...
Consumerism
In the 1980s, the government's political and economic agenda, with its championing of American capitalism, triggered a promotion of self-interest. The decade of the 1980s was ushered in with Ronald Reagan's presidential inauguration in 1981 and was heavily influenced by Reagan's economic philosophy. "Reaganomics," as this philosophy was termed, proposed that the encouragement of the free-market system, which depends on the individual pursuit of wealth, would strengthen the economy. This visio...
Voices of Dissent
Some voices critical to the promotion of America's consumer appetites were emerging in the early 1980s and became stronger at the end of the decade, when evidence of insider tradingon Wall Street resulted in prison terms for greedy speculators. Economists noted that the unemployment rate reached its highest point in more than forty years in 1982, which helped raise the number of Americans living in poverty to the highest level in seventeen years. Sociologists warned of the effects of homeless...
The critical response to This Is Our Youth has been overwhelmingly positive. Many critics, like Robert Brustein, in his review for the New Republic, have applauded the play's realism and praised Lonergan as a "penetrating cultural historian." Brustein characterizes the play as a "sharp [x-ray] of social abscess and moral atrophy," noting its "tough...
Wendy Perkins
Perkins is a professor of American and English literature and film. In this essay, she traces the development of one of the central characters in the play as he takes the first steps toward adulthood. At the beginning of Lonergan's play This Is Our Youth, twenty-one-year-old Dennis Ziegler tells his nineteen-year-old friend Warren Straub, who has just stolen fifteen thousand dollars from his father, "Nobody can stand to have you around because you're such an annoying loudmouthed little creep,...
This Is Our Youth is a play by American dramatist and screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan. It premiered Off-Broadway in 1996 and since been produced all over the world, including the West End, Broadway, Sydney and Toronto.
- Kenneth Lonergan
- 2000
“This Is Our Youth,” written by Kenneth Lonergan, is sodden with nostalgia, but with the kind that’s heavier on bitter than it is on sweet. Lonergan sets the story in the yuppie’s corner of 1980s Manhattan, which is found to be intrinsically riddled with disenchanted teenage delinquency.
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Boiled down to its essentials, This Is Our Youth examines the lives of three post-adolescents. The action spans two days in 1982, two years after Ronald Reagan became president. The cast consists of three characters, with the focus on 21-year-old Dennis and 19-year-old Warren.
