Playwright: adapted by William Massolia from the novel by Ned Vizzini. At: Griffin Theatre Company at Theatre. Building Chicago, 1225 W. Belmont. Phone: 773-327-5252; $15-$24. Runs through: July 6
It might not look like your alma mater or mine, but the student body of Middleborough High School, where our story is set, will be instantly familiar to fans of Hollywood teenpics: uniformly Anglo-European, the offspring of parents comfortable within varying degrees of affluence, their numbers are sufficiently limited to force them into constant social proximity with one another (no apparent interest in drama club is necessary to be cast in the school play, for example). The demographic of our focus is chiefly comprised of—what else?—cool passive dudes and hot sluttish babes. The object of our hero’s desire differs from her peers in being sweet and smart—but still hot, of course—while our hero is a shy boy so obsessed with his own lowly status that he keeps an extensive journal of the slights that he suffers daily. Ah, but his fortunes are about to change, thanks to an orally-implanted computer chip, called a ‘squip,’ programmed to coach him in sure-fire-can’t-fail COOL.
Published in 2005, when the author was only 23 years old, Ned Vizzini’s contribution to the I’m-a-nice-guy-so-why-can’t-I-get-laid literary market taps neatly into the themes we have come to expect of the genre—unsurprisingly, a movie version is forthcoming—before finishing precisely the way we anticipated from the start. But the Griffin Theatre Company, under the guidance of founders Richard Barletta and William Massolia, was reaching out to adolescent angst decades before the current flurry of teenydrammer designed to placate potential playground-shooters. Along with director Jonathan Berry, they address every counterproductive action and self-defeating tactic employed by their play’s painfully clueless personae as if it had been invented yesterday—as its young audiences most likely believe.
The ensemble of actors acquit themselves gamely, lending depth and vulnerability to characters aged either above or below their portrayers’ years, though Edward Paul steals the show in the role of the squip—personified as a black-clad commando with the voice of Keanu Reeves, the body language of an Elvis impersonator and the ethics of Instant Seduction-guru Ross Jeffries. And so, even as we reject Vizzini’s hackneyed notion that peer approval requires the seeker to be a shitheel, we are reminded of a time before we grew wise enough to distinguish the superficial from the true, and to chafe under the clichés proposing to educate us thereon.