Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth starts with 21-year-old Dennis Ziegler hanging out in his studio apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, watching TV. (Since the year is 1982, it’s a big, freestanding cube of a set—the kind with vacuum tubes inside.) The stage directions say he’s got an “old black-and-white movie” on, but they’re not specific about which one. If you’re sitting in the right (i.e., south) section of Steppenwolf Theatre’s upstairs space, though, you can glimpse Boris Karloff on the screen. There’s a fez on his head, and that can mean only one thing: that director Anna D. Shapiro decided Dennis should be watching the original 1932 version of The Mummy.
Warren makes a gesture toward self-reanimation by stealing a big chunk of cash from dad and running away to Dennis’s place (which Dennis’s parents rent for him in order to keep him out of theirs). But that’s a stopgap at best. Grandiose and combative and wound extratight—just the array of tendencies you’d expect the coke he snorts to aggravate—Dennis bullies Warren as a kind of involuntary twitch.
Through 7/27: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM Steppenwolf Theatre, upstairs theater 1650 N. Halsted 312-335-1650 steppenwolf.org $15-$82
