This Is Our Youth

“What’s gonna happen to anybody? Who cares?”

Although Dennis doesn’t often reflect on his own life or its direction, he is always quick to criticize and lecture Warren for possibly making the mistake of ruining his own life. Warren is wiser than he lets on and has long observed Dennis’s indifference toward his future. He has adopted the same sense of indifference even though it isn’t genuinely part of who he is.

“Brunch. (Pause.) That’s a wild concept: It’s not breakfast and it’s not lunch. It’s brunch. (Rolls the words around in his mouth.) ‘Brunch.’ ‘Let’s serve brunch…’ It’s something you serve. (Long pause.) This is strong pot.”

Drugs illustrate the characters’ disillusionment while also inserting comedic relief. As Dennis smokes the joint, he starts to drift off and his thoughts become less and less logical. Lonergan portrays the experience of brain fog and unusually philosophical trains of thought.

“You’re gonna remember your youth like a gray stoned haze punctuated by a series of beatings from your fuckin’ Dad, and like, my jokes. God damn! You know how much pot I’ve thrown out the window for you guys in the middle of the night when you’re wandering around the street like junkies looking for half a joint so you can go to sleep, because you scraped all the resin out of your pipes?”

Dennis often enters monologues in which he goes on about how important, skilled, and intelligent he is. They are a guise for the insecurity he feels about himself and his life, and how he feels lost and directionless. Warren, in spite of his reliance on Dennis, is actually the one who has an idea of who he wants to be.

“You are a depressing little man. Now put that shit away.”

Dennis tends to berate and act condescendingly to everyone around him as a way of feeling confident. When he sees Warren’s collectibles, it reminds him of his childhood, which is not a positive thought for Dennis. Dennis’s accusation that Warren is “depressing” is really a projection of how he feels about himself. Dennis is jaded and his perception of the past is steeped in negativity.

“I got good news for you, so get your little boner ready, ‘cause my girlfriend’s on her way over with your favorite teenage prostitute.”

Dennis is characterized by his vulgar and crass way of speaking. Because the play relies primarily on dialogue, most of what the audience learns about Dennis and the other characters is through their choice of words. Dennis acts with bravado and bullies others for the sake of maintaining his own position as someone above the rest. This was a role he held in high school, and he desperately holds onto it. Letting Go of the Past is Dennis’s greatest obstacle.

“Why do you always have to like, try to have some mincing little bullshit advantage over me all the time? So you don’t feel like such a fat, ugly man or something?…No, man, because you’re like totally uncivilized. You have no sense of protocol, like whatsoever.”

Dennis has a serious lack of self-awareness. Often the flaws and mistakes of which he accuses others are actually his own. This is one of the major sources of irony in the play.

“You’re a handsome guy. You’re like an intelligent fuckin’ interesting guy. You don’t have to do anything. Just don’t get freaked out.”

Dennis does care about Warren deep down; although his kindness comes out in unconventional ways, he occasionally manages to compliment his friend. At the same time, Dennis can’t help but insult Warren in order to reinstate his position as the dominant person.

“I’m not talking about the last pathetic remnants of—Upper West Side Jewish…liberalism. I’m talking about the mainstream, and it is such a joke. I mean, I definitely feel that evil has like, triumphed in our time.”

Jessica reflects on the political culture of the decade, with Reagan recently elected and a shift toward The Pointless Pursuit of Materialism. She observes how passionate, freedom-fighting youth of the 1960s and 1970s have grown into money-mongering adults. This leaning toward cynicism adds to The Disillusionment of Adulthood.

“The last year of high school, I suddenly realized that all these weird kids I grew up with were like well on their way to becoming really weird adults. And it was pretty scary, you know?”

Warren holds opposing beliefs to Jessica’s. He feels that people do not ultimately change, but just grow more into themselves as they get older. He doesn’t have the same sense of fleetingness that Jessica feels and manages the fear of getting older more effectively than his peers.

“And it just makes you realize that there’s these huge swaths of time in your life that didn’t register at all, and that you might just as well have been dead during them for all the difference they make to you now.”

For Jessica, aging means discovering that she no longer recognizes her past self. This instills a sense of fear; it implies that she may one day fail to recognize her current self as well. The sense that she is forever changing and will one day be gone is ever-looming in her life.

“Warren starts dancing in his own separate space. He takes a few tentative steps toward her, then she moves unambiguously to him, and they start dancing more or less together.”

Lonergan’s descriptions of action are brief and fairly infrequent, which gives the players a great deal of freedom to choose their movements and positions. The sparseness of stated action also emphasizes the action descriptions that do exist and their importance. The moment in which Warren and Jessica move toward one another symbolizes their romantic attraction and deeper connection.

“But listen—would you be mortally offended if I kissed you for just a second?”

Warren’s chivalry and respect for others is his shining trait, one which sets him apart from Dennis in particular. Warren and Dennis are opposites or foils in this regard, as Dennis has no issue demeaning and dehumanizing the women in his life by treating them as sex objects. In contrast, Warren wants to be a gentleman and ensure consent before even a kiss.

“OK: You’re outta control. You are like hell bent for destruction and I want nothing more to fuckin’ do with it!”

Dennis’s emotional reactions to Warren’s mistakes aren’t totally unfounded. They also represent Dennis’s exaggerated and intense character, as well as his tendency to care more about others’ lives than his own.

“You have a nice touch, man.”

Warren’s sarcastic remark is meant to be humorous and represents his attitude toward Dennis. Warren admires Dennis but also sees his flaws. Witnessing the way Dennis screams at his girlfriend gives Warren an excuse to show himself as the bigger, better person, if only for a moment.

“I am a total business genius. I don’t even know what this shit is worth and I’m already getting you like the best possible price for it. I am just like completely naturally gifted at business.”

Dennis brags about his financial wizardry yet is unaware that he is about to be horribly underpaid for Warren’s collection. It is a moment of reverse foreshadowing, in which the character’s statement hints toward the opposite result.

“I’m not talking about anything. It’s just something to say. Don’t you want to kiss me Good Morgen?”

Warren’s glib sense of humor is lost on Jessica, who is a more practical and serious person. Warren also doesn’t fully understand why Jessica is there or how she feels about him; his choice to begin with a joke is largely the result of his own temporary ignorance.

“I don’t know, man. I guess there’s only a certain amount of time you can keep doing this shit before shit starts to happen to you. I mean I am really scared.”

When Stuey dies of an overdose, Dennis experiences an epiphany about the fragility of life and the terrifying reality that he will one day die as well. Dennis is 21, but he feels like he is wasting his life and lacks any sort of purpose or direction. He doesn’t want to end up like Stuey, who died before he ever had the chance to accomplish anything.

“I mean that was it. That was his life. Period.”

The Pointless Pursuit of Materialism has fulfilled Dennis up to a point, but now that he has reached adulthood, the temporary pleasures of money, sex, and drugs are starting to lose their appeal. The death of his friend Stuey forces Dennis to reflect on his own life and to take stock of what he wants to make of it. The sentence fragments underscore Dennis’s view that Stuey led a meaningless life, as well as his fear that his own life will lack purpose.