College dropout Jeff (Josh Hamilton) is the mind of the group, condemning America as a ““caldron of spiritual oatmeal.’’ Buff (Steve Zahn) is its no-mind, a ““postmodern idiot savant’’ who zooms around on his Rollerblades and flexes his mini-Arnold muscles. Tim (Tim Guinee) is an air-force vet, an alcoholic who spews racist venom and seems like the kind of guy who commits sudden massacres in places like 7-Elevens. Bee-Bee (Wendy Hoopes) is a rehabbing druggie whose spirit is wrung out like a rag doll in a trash can. Sooze (Martha Plimpton) at least has ambition: she wants to get out of the edge-city limbo of Burnfield and become a performance artist in New York. They’re all waiting for their own Generation X Godot, an old buddy, Pony, who’s become a rock star. Eventually Pony (Zak Orth) arrives in a stretch limo accompanied by his publicist, Erica (Babette Renee Props). Inevitably, there’s a breakout of sex, drugs, rock and roll – and violence.
Any freshman drama student could point out that Bogosian as a playwright has a way to go with things like structure and development. But the play’s tornado energy and language ring out like a boombox with brains. This being Bogosian, you expect that the characters will erupt into riffs like his monologues, and they do. But ““Suburbia’’ is a real play, a scarifying dissection of youthful disillusion that manages to be both appalling and appealing. It’s directed with perfect pitch and pace by Robert Falls at New York’s Lincoln Center, where the Mitzi Newhouse Theater can barely contain the high voltage of a marvelous young ensemble cast.
Whether it’s Jeff attacking America’s ““guilty idealism,’’ Buff expressing gratitude for the panacea of Oreos, Tim denouncing all Third World countries as excrement or Sooze launching into a virtuoso takeoff on feminist performance art, these actors find a punk eloquence in their anthems of anomie.
The characters reflect what Bogosian, 41, once called ““the frenzy going on in my head.’’ Though ““Suburbia’’ is about Generation X, it reflects his own growing up in a Massachusetts suburb where, he told Newsweek, ““I was going to work at the mall and do nothing. One day I realized that if I was willing to not be afraid of the demons in my mind I could move forward.’’ Like Jeff, he dropped out of college – the University of Chicago – went on to study theater at Oberlin, came to New York intimidated by ““all this urban stuff.’’ In the ’70s, Joseph Papp recognized his unique talent as a monologuist. Fiercely critical of the ““materialistic, arid and defeating environment’’ that ““Suburbia’’ evokes, Bogosian finds the life force inside characters who have been marooned on an asphalt island in an ocean of wrecked expectations.
