Settings don’t get much more iconographic than the one in Eric Bogosian’s “SubUrbia”:
A small pack of 20-something waifs, hanging out at their suburb’s 7-Eleven, drinking, smoking pot, flirting, having casual sex and dreaming, fitfully and without hope, of moving on to the big city. Theirs is the latest in a continuing series of lost generations, each one more desolate than the last.
When it premiered at Lincoln Center last season, in a production staged by the Goodman Theatre’s Robert Falls, Bogosian’s work drew instant attention for its blood-on-the-walls energy and insight into Generation X and suburban youthful ennui.
Indeed, for Bogosian, the play serves as both backward glance and cross-generational valentine. A onetime troubled suburban kid himself, Bogosian, now 41, is famous as an actor-comedian-performance artist in vehicles including the stage and film “Talk Radio” and the stage “Sex, Drugs, Rock-and-Roll.” He says he wanted to give young actors something they could chew on, like hungry mongrels.
“I was a young actor once myself, and there aren’t that many things being written that speak to them,” he says. “The theater is split, in my opinion. Onstage, on one side of the footlights, are starving young actors, doing the entertaining. On the other, in the audience, are older, wealthier, often fatter individuals.
“I wanted something young groups could perform that would be seen by young people. I wanted theater that would reflect the needs and fears and hates of those who, much of the time, do the performing.”
“SubUrbia” is set in a ’90s milieu: Its characters have a hostile disdain for the counterculture, while its score blasts away with the music of Nine Inch Nails. But Bogosian also attempts a sleight of hand. He draws from his own youth-he dropped out of the University of Chicago and drifted-to craft a story all about transition, and the fading idealism that has been accompanying and sometimes crushing young people since the 1960s.
“It’s even more generous than that,” says Falls, whom Bogosian met and asked to direct “SubUrbia” while Falls was staging “On the Open Road” at New York’s Public Theatre. “Eric had a rough time in his 20s, but he pulled it together, and to some extent he’s a role model. He befriends and works with young people in trouble, to this day.”
Last season’s Lincoln Center production was both invigorating and frustrating for Bogosian. The young ensemble worked on a lot of the scenes by improvising; Bogosian would watch them and then incorporate their ideas. But at first many of the viewers of the show were Lincoln Center’s older subscribers, who were enthusiastic, but who were not the age group Bogosian sought. It wasn’t until late in the run that younger audiences arrived.
Meanwhile, Bogosian always envisioned the drama as a kind of rough blueprint young troupes around the country could make their own. That is exactly what appears to be happening in Chicago, where Roadworks Productions, a promising troupe of artists in their 20s, will be staging the area premiere of “SubUrbia” beginning Thursday at the Theatre Building.
Winning the rights to a New York production this soon after last summer’s closing was quite a coup for the mostly unknown, non-Equity troupe. Conveniently, Falls himself had taken an interest in them long before he directed “SubUrbia,” and he served as reference. They had approached Bogosian with a passionate letter insisting they were the troupe to do the script, as they were the characters’ ages and knew about “SubUrbia’s” life experiences.
To show his support, Bogosian agreed to attend a benefit performance Wednesday to witness their craftsmanship firsthand. He isn’t worried. “It’s not a precious thing,” he says. “It’s a kamikaze piece. If they throw themselves into it, they’ll get there.”
The characters are post-teen flotsam and jetsam. Jeff can’t decide what to do with his life or whether to go with his girl Sooze to New York, where she wants to become a performance artist. He and his hyperactive, roller-blading sidekick, Buff, spend their time outside the convenience store, wrestling and debating with Tim, whose brief stint in the army has left him an embittered bigot and alcoholic. Bee-Bee, Sooze’s friend and graduate of a rehab ward, is also part of the pack; inside the 7-Eleven, a Pakistani brother and sister, also in their 20s, run the store and frequently emerge to try to chase away the crowd-immigrant dreamers at odds with their peers.
In the evening and morning in which the play takes place, another character, Pony, a former friend making it marginally in a rock band, arrives in a limo from a world beyond. With him is an ambitious young woman named Erica, who is involved in the band’s public relations. Pony is that long-awaited emissary from the big time, and he offers Sooze and others both a chance to leave and a glimpse of what little there really is to leave for. If anything, his disillusionment is more intense than theirs.
“It’s about that time in your life when you realize either you hang up your conscience and be bulletproof, to succeed, or you get hurt,” Bogosian says.
“The capital `U’ (in the title) is intentional,” he adds. “These people are truly sub-urban. They think they know everything about everything. In fact, they don’t know anything about anything. Even their image of New York is `romantic.’ “
The production looms as a potential gold mine for the three-year-old Roadworks. Created after a 1992 student production of “Road” at Northwestern, the company has enjoyed a string of modest successes, including the Jeff Award-winning original adaptation of John Barth’s “The End of the Road.” All but one work so far has been staged by artistic director Abby Epstein-a onetime New York City suburbanite herself-who is directing “SubUrbia.”
“I get the impression Eric was a little freaked out by all the extravagance of the Lincoln Center production,” she says. “The set, he indicated, cost more than it would take to build an actual 7-Eleven, down to the Snickers bars on the fully stocked shelves. He’s a little taken aback that ours is only a 148-seat theater, but the show is meant to be rough and volcanic. We know these people. We’re working day jobs, we’re in the service sector and I grew up in a suburb.
“And they are scary places,” she says. “The motto of mine was, `All (messed) up and no place to go.’ Driving around and drinking in the woods was the big activity. Suburbs started as something beautiful and clean, but now they’re a wasteland.”
“SubUrbia” boasts a Chekhovian ensemble structure-no one of its nine characters dominates. Instead, each is given some time at center stage. Falls and Bogosian talk of the parallels to “Three Sisters.”
“The sisters are, after all, suburbanites,” Bogosian says.
Falls admits he got the idea of staging “Three Sisters”-his upcoming mainstage production at the Goodman-while working on “SubUrbia.” As a result, it will be “a very young `Three Sisters,’ ” he says.
But “SubUrbia” is also roller blading and pizza eating and Chinese food fights (“I wouldn’t want to sit in the front row,” Epstein admits).
“It’s about actors who can come in and ricochet around a stage,” Bogosian says. “It’s not about theory. It’s about energy.”
But Epstein sees theory, too. “He says some deep things about America,” she says, “and they’re pretty moving.”
