SubUrbia
at Cafe Voltaire
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Ten years ago, before Generation Xers became the flavor of the month, SurUrbia would have made quite a splash with its brutal portrayal of privileged youth hopelessly drifting and cynically devouring their own kind. Its New York premiere last year certainly sent critics into superlative-induced comas. But the play covers territory already well traveled by everyone from Richard Linklater to Douglas Coupland to People magazine. Moreover its discursive structure and focus on self-destructive behavior, hard drinking, and personal confessions make it nearly indistinguishable from almost every American kitchen-sink tragedy penned over the past 30 years. Works as diverse as A Raisin in the Sun, Less Than Zero, and The Graduate have already taught us that the American dream is a sham. SubUrbia is simply arriving too late on the scene.
More problematic than the play’s derivative nature is its fundamental contradictions. One of the tragic features of Bogosian’s suburban world is its myopia. All roads double back on themselves, and the outside world–of urban life, of foreign lands, of adulthood–doesn’t seem very enticing, except in highly abstract or romanticized terms. But Bogosian considers little beyond the collapsed circumstances of his characters’ lives. The drama revolves almost entirely around whatever threatens the integrity of the group, from infidelity to past emotional traumas to suicidal tendencies. History here is personal history; this world has been hermetically sealed, divided from the larger social and political world in which it’s embedded.
Like Bogosian’s suburban landscape, one could envision Cafe Voltaire’s basement performance space as hermetically sealed. Of the 50 or so productions I’ve seen there over the last few years, not one comes to mind that engaged the light-of-day social and political realities upstairs. I’ve seen fantastically imaginative work, but nothing that holds a candle to a quick glance through Harper’s Index.
