AUDITIONS

[ DENNIS ZIEGLER ]
MALE, to play 21, any ethnicity. "He is a grungy, handsome, very athletic, formerly long-haired kid, just twenty-one years old, wearing baggy chino-type pants and an ancient polo shirt. He is a very quick, dynamic, fanatical, and bullying kind of person; amazingly good-natured and magnetic, but insanely competitive and almost always successfully so; a dark cult god of high school only recently encountering, without necessarily recognizing, the first evidence that the dazzling, aggressive hipster techniques with which he has always dominated his peers might not stand him in good stead for much longer."

[ WARREN STAUB ]
MALE, to play 19, any ethnicity. "He is a skinny nineteen-year-old— a strange barking-dog of a kid with large tracts of thoughtfulness in his personality that are not doing him much good at the moment, probably because they so infrequently influence his actions. He has spent most of his adolescence in hot water of one kind or another, and is just beginning to find beneath his natural eccentricity a dogged self-possession his friends may not all share. But despite his enormous self-destructiveness, he is above all things a trier. His language and wardrobe are heavily influenced by DENNIS—but only up to a point, and he would be a good- looking kid if he eased up on his personal style a little."

[ JESSICA GOLDMAN ]
FEMALE, to play 19, any ethnicity. "The same age as WARREN—around nineteen. She wears effective makeup, big shoes, and a slightly pricey little dress that shows off her figure to good advantage. She is dressed up for the night, not down, and definitely looks a little out of place in DENNIS’s grunge palace. She is a fairly cheerful but very nervous girl, whose self- taught method of coping with her nervousness consists of seeking out the nearest available oasis of self-assurance and entrenching herself there with 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 that might eventually make her less nervous to begin with. Despite her prickliness, she is basically friendly, definitely interested in WARREN, and trying to make a good impression."

PRE-CASTING: The role of Jessica Goldman will be doubled and one actor has already been cast in this track. Both actors will share performance dates. Each actor is guaranteed a minimum of three performances.

Stage Violence and Intimacy: The play will include stage violence, choreographed by a trained fight director. While many of these moments are jocular “male bonding” between Dennis and Warren, they tend to escalate with the domineering Dennis overpowering Warren. Dennis smacks and physically threatens Warren throughout the play and at one point wrestles him to the ground, kicking and hitting him.

The play also presents moments of intimacy and levels of undress. Sexual content is discussed throughout — often from a misogynistic viewpoint. Warren and Jessica share several instances of intimacy including: Awkward “greeting” and “morning after” kisses and
“heavy teen-age-style making-out."

Actors may appear in underwear, but there will be no nudity. All intimacy choreography will be worked on with an intimacy director/choreographer. There will be NO kissing, undressing, or nudity allowed at auditions or callbacks.

Storyline: In 1982 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the wealthy, articulate, pot-smoking teenagers who were small children in the ’60s have emerged as young adults in a country that has just resoundingly rejected everything they were brought up to believe in. The very last wave of New York City’s ’60s-style liberalism has come of age – and there’s nowhere left to go.

This is Our Youth follows 48 hours in the lives of three very lost young souls in the big city in meticulous, hilarious, and agonizing detail, at the dawn of the Reagan era. The trio includes Warren Straub, a dejected 19-year-old who steals $15,000 from his abusive lingerie-tycoon father; Dennis Ziegler, the charismatic domineering drug-dealing friend who helps him put the money to good use; and Jessica Goldman, the anxiously insightful young woman Warren yearns for.

Funny, painful and compassionate, This Is Our Youth is a living snapshot of the moment between adolescence and adulthood when many young people first go out into the world on their own, armed only with the ideas and techniques they developed as teenagers – ideas and techniques far more sophisticated than their parents ever realize, and far less effectual than they themselves can possibly imagine.