Hey, kids: want to feel connected to something that feels real? Forget Fox, WB, or Hollywood's latest bogus, cynical-slick "youth" product. For energy, biting comedy, and a taste of the sheer, raw awfulness of high school, hustle over to Dobama Theatre's Night Kitchen. There, for the next two weekends at 11 pm, you can catch Cleveland's freshest young talent in Toni K. Thayer's "Angst:84". In a McDonald's world, it's like a triple-hit of espresso.
Thayer's satirical comedy, which looks at a day in an "average" 1984 high school outside a bank of student lockers, is the latest new work commissioned by DNK Artistic Director Dan Kilbane, who directs. It's a triumphant flowering of the Night Kitchen's process, an ensemble-driven young company full of writer-performers who have cut their teeth on long-form improv, satiric live soaps, and festivals of short plays written by and about the 15-30 age group.
Thayer and Kilbane take no prisoners in the slam-bang Orwellian farce, which shows high school as a place of endless surveillance. It's not just the proto-fascist hall monitor (Elliott Klein) primly marking down demerits in the name of Principal Duce, whose posters line the corridors and comic New-Speak pronouncements are quoted on the P.A. It's also the peer-enforced social codes: who is deemed cool enough to date, how to dress, how to speak and think. Thayer shows those codes to be as rigid and stifling as any documented by Jane Austen or Thackeray.
The fourteen-member cast swirls in and out of the hallway like a flock of exotic birds, chattering about the unfolding drama of the central characters. Shannon (Heather N. Stout) is the bitterly self-conscious narrator who transforms herself from "normal" schoolgirl to defiant freak in full audience view: exchanging plaid skirt for ripped black tights, wild hair, and mask of ghoulish makeup. On permanent detention, she observes and wryly comments on the passing parade.
There are the closeted Young Republican (Rob Nix) and his affection-starved girlfriend (Raquel Brown), manning a petition booth to end the school lunch program, and the rumpled hunk of a gay Canadian exchange student (Brian Douglas) who upsets their apple cart. There's the terminally shallow cheerleader Winnie (Elana Averbach) whose secret dalliance with a third-string varsity benchwarmer (Kitao Sakurai) creates a scandal. There's the heartbreakingly awkward "I missed my period" conversation between a tough working-class Metalhead (Sabrina Gibbar) and her clueless, slacker boyfriend (J. P. Morgan).
Thayer's witty-sad play makes you care about them all, and her accompanying sound score of period music keeps the intermissionless 80-minute play rocking with energy. It's a fresh, imaginative debut.
Originally published in the Plain Dealer.