ERIC BOGOSIAN REVIVES THE SUBURBAN ENNUI OF THE 90S
By Hilton Als
New Yorker
Oct 2 2006
The Lost Boys
Resentment is scrawled like graffiti across the faces of the major
characters in Eric Bogosian’s 1994 play "subUrbia" (now in revival,
in an updated version, at the Second Stage). Blowing around the stage
like ragged refuse, the three boys who instigate much of the play’s
action have all-American names that suit their junk-food-filled days
and porn-obsessed nights: Buff (the exceptional Kieran Culkin),
Tim (Peter Scanavino), and Jeff (Daniel Eric Gold). This gang of
post-high-school boys from small-town U.S.A., with their worn-down
tennis shoes, dirty jeans, and stained T-shirts, are going nowhere
fast-leaving tire marks on the backs of those who show them any love
at all.
We’ve seen this type before. Their most famous predecessors hung
out at Doc’s drugstore, on the white side of the racial divide,
in "West Side Story" (1957). Seven years later, Amiri Baraka, then
known as LeRoi Jones, told some of their secret stories, with lyrical
ferocity, in his one-act play "The Toilet." Some thirty years on,
in Bogosian’s play, these early Johnny Knoxvilles pick up where the
"Spur Posse" of Lakewood, California, left off: they want to nail
chicks and score points, sure, but their testosterone-doped minds are
just as interested in harassing immigrants and downing the booze,
pizza, and greasy Chinese takeout that invariably make one of them
sick. Sporting the uniforms of discontent, slapping one another on
the head-is this the only way for young white working-class men to
express friendship? Their creator seems to think so.
Bogosian established his niche as a monologuist soon after his
arrival on New York’s downtown theatre scene, in 1976. (He was born of
Armenian parentage, in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1953.) With his deep,
husky voice, his large green eyes, and his dark mop of unkempt hair,
Bogosian was one of the first working-class lugs to declare himself
an artist in the androgynous age of Devo. A kind of federally funded
Bruce Springsteen (he received two fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts), he produced a series of angry performance
pieces-from "Men Inside" (1982) to "Pounding Nails in the Floor with
My Forehead" (1994)-that distinguished him from the relatively effete,
intellectual monologuist Spalding Gray, as well as from Karen Finley
and her physical, feminist work. Bogosian ranted in defense not of his
own world view as an artist, or of a traditional underclass, but of
the maligned and often ignored plebs in flannel shirts; he set about
bringing men back from Mars. In his short monologue "The Fan," from
"Pounding Nails," a male admirer goes from joy to bitterness as the
object of his obsession tries to get rid of him. And in "Superman!,"
a sketch from "Men Inside," a little boy intones, "Hey Dad, guess
what I did today? I ran as fast as I could and I threw a rock at a
bird and I killed it! Pretty good, huh Dad?
Hey Dad, when I grow up I’m gonna be just like you, huh Dad? I’m
gonna be tall and strong and never make any mistakes and drink beer
and shave and drive a car and get a check. I’m gonna be just like
you, huh Dad?" While telling these distinctly male stories, Bogosian
was careful to maintain a whiff of irony, so as not to alienate his
audience with too much machismo.
As directed by the able Jo Bonney (who is married to Bogosian),
"subUrbia" demands a great deal of energy from its cast. Perhaps the
play’s non-stop action is meant to compensate for its lack of dramatic
variety: shit happens, but it happens over and over. Hanging out in
front of a 7-Eleven-type convenience store, Tim drinks a six-pack. Buff
talks about banging chicks. Jeff is going out with Sooze (the great
Gaby Hoffmann), who is best friends with the bespectacled, fragile
Bee-Bee (Halley Feiffer), who just got out of rehab. Sooze wants
to be an artist. She does performance pieces about men being dicks
("Fuck the President. Fuck the Vice-President. Fuck the Secretary
of Defense. Fuck the Secretary of Offense. Fuck the Pope. Fuck
my dad"). By including Sooze and Bee-Bee in this male-dominated
story, Bogosian is, of course, winking at the audience. The girls’
self-awareness is a perfect counterpoint to their male companions’
lack of awareness of anything at all. The men grudgingly applaud
Sooze’s efforts ("Is that supposed to be about me?" Jeff asks). But she
doesn’t capture their attention: they’d rather listen to Tim making
derogatory remarks about the convenience store’s Pakistani owners,
who are desperate for a little peace-let alone a little commerce.
Time passes in this way until an old friend, Pony (Michael Esper),
briefly returns to the fold. Once content to be a lout, Pony has
moved on to become a burgeoning rock star. Accompanied by Erica (the
excellent Jessica Capshaw), his publicist from Bel Air, Pony tries
to share his success with his friends, who will have none of it:
accepting Pony and his limo would mean letting go of their resentment
of him for having left and made something of himself. Sooze still
seems to have a thing for Pony, but she also seems to have a thing for
the boys who try to hold her back. Where would she be without their
resistance? To be with Pony, to become a woman and an artist, she’d
have to take some risks, and she’s as stunted as her boyfriend, Jeff.
To this relatively uninteresting dilemma, which is never resolved,
Bogosian adds a possible murder: Jeff believes that Tim, after a
drunken dalliance with Erica, has killed her. But this is little more
than a dramatic device. Erica has simply gone off with another member
of the gang, thus proving the age-old adage that all any upper-class
chick needs is to be brought back down to earth via a good, untutored
lay. The problem is no sooner solved than Bogosian rushes in with
a suicide, a kind of halfhearted coda to the proceedings, which,
in the end, are little more than a series of set pieces punctuated
by profanity.
When the play was first produced, "Reality Bites," Ben Stiller’s
movie about the disaffected youth of Houston, was a modest hit,
outstripped in its freaked-out adolescent mythology (and nostalgia)
by Richard Linklater’s 1993 hit "Dazed and Confused." (Linklater later
directed "subUrbia" for the screen.) It was chic, on the stages and
screens of the early nineties, to throw young adults into the American
cultural-and thus moral-wasteland and see what happened.
That little did happen was part of the story: the common assumption
was that the youth of the day were too dazed or confused to develop
their own narratives. Bogosian, like many other writers tackling
this subject matter back then, was so busy indicting the Zeitgeist
of suburbia that he forgot to attach a credible story to it.
As Tim, the most troubled member of the tribe, who has just returned
from a stint in the Navy, however, Scanavino gives a performance that
transcends the limitations of the script. (He brought a similar stellar
quality to his small part as a poor hustler in Conor McPherson’s
"Shining City.") A puffy-eyed alcoholic, Scanavino’s Tim oddly
resembles Julie Harris as the sensitive tomboy Frankie Addams,
in the 1952 film version of Carson McCullers’s "The Member of the
Wedding." You can feel his panic surge as the sun goes down; no street
light shining through the foliage can illuminate his pain. Tim uses
booze to give him the courage he needs to be an asshole, but his
sensitivity keeps breaking through. His lithe body is twisted in
an imitation of what it means to be a man. Itching for a fight,
he’s really just looking for a way out. Whenever he climbs up to
the roof of the convenience store to get a better view of the world,
one fears for him. Will he jump?
Theatrical fashions, like all fashions, change, and Neil LaBute has
replaced Bogosian as the go-to guy for visions of the depraved male.
Exhuming "subUrbia" (and trying to update it to a new decade) feels
like an attempt, on Bogosian and Bonney’s part, to reclaim the
territory that LaBute has populated so aggressively. But Bogosian
can’t compete with his successor, nor should he try to. Doing so only
lessens the value of his own work, which, in its time, had a charm
and a purpose.
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