Casting Call: 'This is Our Youth'

Mystic Vision Players will hold auditions for Kenneth Lonergan’s "This Is Our Youth", a brilliant, darkly humorous, bittersweet portrait of youth poised on the cusp of the scary, disillusioning path to adulthood.

In Reagan-era New York City, three privileged Upper West Side kids — the swaggering, drug-dealing Dennis; his dispirited, free-thinking best friend and whipping boy, Warren; and confused, self-conscious fashion student Jessica — hang out, smoke pot, scheme for cash, challenge each other, and make tentative steps towards authentic, vulnerable connection, all in a period of less than twenty-four hours in Dennis’ apartment.

Auditionees should prepare a resumé and headshot to submit both via email and as hard copies at auditions. Sides will be provided at auditions. All auditions are asked to be familiar with the play. Auditions are to be held by appointment only.

Warren Straub (19)	A skinny college drop-out; a 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, but 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, a trier. He looks up to and loyally hero-worships Dennis.
Dennis Ziegler (21)	Grungy, handsome and athletic; very quick, dynamic, fanatical, and a bullying type of person. Amazingly good-natured and magnetic, but insanely competitive and almost always successfully so; a dark cult god of high school only recently encountering, without necessarily recognizing, the first evidence that the dazzling aggressive techniques with which he has always dominated his peers might not stand him in good stead for much longer. He has sold weed since he was sixteen, out of want rather than necessity, and is close with Warren.
Jessica Goldman (19)	A very nervous girl, whose self-taught method of coping with her nervousness consists of seeking out the nearest available oasis of self-assurance and entrenching herself there with 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 which might eventually make her less nervous to begin with. Despite her prickliness she is basically friendly and definitely interested in Warren, as well as being close friends with Dennis’ on-and-off girlfriend.

Auditions will be held March 7 and 10 in the UCPAC Hamilton Stage Blue Room. Rehearsals will begin the week of April 18, with 2-3 rehearsals per week based on cast availability. The show will run at 8 p.m. May 19-21 and 26-28.

To schedule an audition appointment, fill out the form here. The UCPAC Hamilton Stage is located at 360 Hamilton Street, Rahway.