By Kenneth Lonergan
Audition Dates: February 10 & 11, 2025 at 7 pm by appointment only (Possible callbacks February 12). Please keep checking back for audition registration to open!
Production Dates: March 27 – April 6, 2025 (8 performances)
Director: Maya Suchy
Where: The Lake Worth Playhouse – 713 Lake Ave, Lake Worth Beach, Florida 33460
This is a Black Box Series Production in our Stonzek Studio Theater.
What to Prepare: Auditions will be a cold reading of selected sides from the script. Sides will be provided when you register for an audition time slot.
About the Show:
Set in New York in 1982, This Is Our Youth follows forty-eight hours in the lives of three very lost young souls: Warren, a dejected nineteen-year-old who has just stolen $15,000 from his abusive, tycoon father; Dennis, his charismatic drug-dealing friend who helps Warren put the stolen money to good use; and, Jessica, the anxiously insightful young woman who Warren yearns for. Funny, painful, and compassionate, This Is Our Youth is a living snapshot of the moment when many young people go out into the world on their own, armed only with the ideas and techniques they developed as teenagers—far more sophisticated than their parents realize, and far less effectual than they themselves can possibly imagine.
Available Roles (The Lake Worth Playhouse encourages people of all races, abilities, and genders to audition for the roles they most identify with.):
Warren (Must be able to play late teens to early 20s): a nineteen-year-old strange barking dog of a kid with large tracts of thoughtfulness in his personality that are not doing him much good at the moment, probably because they so infrequently influence his actions. He has spent most of his adolescence in hot water of one kind or another, and is just beginning to find beneath his natural eccentricity a dogged self-possession his friends may not all share; despite his enormous self-destructiveness, he is above all things a trier; his language and wardrobe are heavily influenced by Dennis–but only up to a point; he would be a good-looking kid if he eased up on his personal style a little. He attended Oberlin University for less than a year before dropping out and has just been thrown out of his father’s house for constantly smoking pot; his parents are divorced and his older sister was murdered several years prior.
Dennis (Must be able to play late teens to early 20s): a grungy, handsome, very athletic formerly long-haired kid. Quick, dynamic, fanatical, and bullying kind of person. Amazingly good-natured and magnetic, but insanely competitive and almost always successfully so; a dark cult of high school only recently encountering, without necessarily recognizing, the first evidence that the dazzling aggressive hipster techniques with which he has always dominated his peers might not stand him in good stead for much longer. He is the son of a successful artist that has allowed him to live independently at the cost of his own education, and furthering a relationship with his own parents. The time away has allowed him to amass a small influence of ‘business’ contacts for weed, drugs, and other explicit goods that may not be as well established as he believes.
Jessica (Must be able to play late teens to early 20s): nineteen-year-old Jessica Goldman is a “cheerful but very nervous girl” who displays “a watchful defensiveness that sweeps away anything that might threaten to dislodge her, including her own chances at happiness and the opportunity of gaining a wider perspective on the world”; she uses defensiveness to help her project her own image of herself as a hip, intelligent, independent young woman who cannot be taken advantage of, yet her actions suggest that she is not as self-assured as she appears; she lives with her parents and is a first-year student at the Fashion Institute of New York.
For questions or to request further information please contact Artistic Director, Daniel Eilola at daniel@lakeworthplayhouse.org.
The Lake Worth Playhouse encourages people of all races, abilities, and genders to audition for the roles they most identify with. The Lake Worth Playhouse strives to make all of our staff and volunteers feel valued, appreciated, and free to be who they are at work regardless of gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, neurodiversity, disability status, citizenship, or any other aspect which makes them unique. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or if there are any accommodations we can provide.
The Lake Worth Playhouse is a non-profit community theatre that provides entertainment, education and opportunities for artistic expression through volunteerism and community involvement and support.