There is that nervous anticipation of a first date when one is on the way to a play. A commitment is implied, and not just because it would be rude to leave in the middle, if a good reason to leave should seize the mind. The play is something short of two hours for the audience, but no one is unaware that what is being done on the stage is the culmination of much longer hours, a lot of sweat, likely plenty of tears, and in every act, a confrontation with the abyss that surrounds us, that which most of us most of the time have learned to whistle past, but which actors make a point of staring into.

It’s more: the actors have arrived at the same building and are readying themselves somewhere hidden behind or below or above after years of chasing demons—Dad? Mom? Brother? Self?—around and around their head in a Groundhog Day-like eternal wrestling match where the only victory is arriving next day ready to take them on again, to earn only another draw like it was some ridiculous chess match of never-ending draws.

That’s why it’s a commitment to walk through the arch into the hushed blackened space where an intimacy is about to take place: there is something unsettling about sharing space with actors who are about to act, something akin to walking accidentally into someone’s bedroom when you were looking for the bathroom.

It’s when the lights dim further yet that one settles back, not out of impatience, but with the almost thrilling realization that all this—the set you are trying to figure out, the music you are tuning in to, the props you are noticing here and there, the actors now slipping out under cover of dark to take their placers—has been arranged for your personal enjoyment, that there is nothing expected of you on this peculiar date beyond sliding down, sinking back, and watching and enjoying, even in the close air of such intimacy.

This night was at the Granville Island stage, the Playwrights Theatre Centre, and for performance was Eric Bogosian’s Suburbia, directed by Sabrina Evertt and staged by the Twenty Something Theatre Company. This company, as one might guess from its name, exists to create opportunities for young (twenty something) actors to work in a professional setting with challenging and critical material.

Suburbia is certainly a challenging work. Bogosian is best known for his 1987 Talk Radio that fairly blew away audiences then just sensing the enormity of the warring fundamentalist genies that seven years of Reagan-mania had by then uncorked. Certainly the best part of that Bogosian play was the wasted teen invited down to the radio station studio. Bogosian has some kind of morbid fascination with the language and usage of the fin de seicle American teen—and why not, the entire marketing world does too, and as marketing is the world, that wasted teen Bogosian is fascinated with happens to be the centre of the universe, like it or not.

And so Suburbia, Bogosian’s full face-on confrontation with a whole bunch of teems doing what they do—hanging around outside a 7-11 in some place craftily named Burnsville. By the end, after some random gunplay, rumours of a beating of a female snobbish outsider, implications of gratuitous sex, the break-up of a relationship and a whole lot of clumsy ill-informed soul-searching, one of the teens dies.

It’s the kind of thing found on page 3 of The Province fear-mongering tabloid newspaper virtually every other week. But there is no more a “why” supplied by Bogosian than there is in the inevitable court case, tearful demands of parents, pronouncements of the politicians or the tsk-tsking that fill column inches in the press sufficient to keep all the ads apart were this particular story to have happened in real life. Everyone asks “Why?” and Bogosian’s answer in Suburbia is, there is no why.

This is an excellent choice of play for the producer, also Sabrina Evertt, to have selected for a performance by twenty something actors. They intuitively know all about the grating stupidity of everyone who asks “why,” not having been sufficiently socialized yet to understand that it’s impolite to point out to all concerned that the beloved teen who died did so for no reason. Only the actors know there is a death coming at the end.

The pacing of the actors parted from realism and certainly Bogosian was pushing harder then he need have with his script leaving the actors with material that would have been maudlin if the pauses of nothingness that typically punctuates speech, teen speech in particular, were inserted by the actors. But there is no question they achieved art: each actor in this ensemble cast fully inhabited the character drawn for them.

That’s true despite the fact some characters—Jeff and Tim in particular, played with vibrating tension by Ian Harman and Shaun Aqualine respectively—switched back and forth a few times in the sympathy and lack of it they engendered from the audience.

Sooze and Bee Bee, played brashly and yet strikingly sensitively by Rachel Aberle and Abby Renee Creek, played the two voices of reason, one ending up running off to New York with the prodigally returned rock star Neil “Pony” Moynihan, played convincingly by Rhys Finnick, and the other, Bee Beee, ending up the dead one. Creek in particular captured with a shivering dead-to-rights portrayal the plight of the lost soul, caught between the boys but close to none, and clearly feeling the worse of the two girls for not having an escape plan.

The character named Buff, played by Deneh Thompson, is the most realistic of the Bogosian teens for not caring about there being no future in Burnsville. Thompson seems to know—thankfully—the role of his character is not really having a role, not of the kind that is changed in any event. Not all actors can leave such a role alone with the deft touch, a dummy they call it in a soccer scoring play, the one who doesn’t touch the ball.

David Villegas and Odessa Cadieux-Rey play the brother and sister who own the 7-11 plagued by the littering, swearing obnoxious teens outside, in the characters of Ricardo “Richard” Garcia and Maria Garcia. In the original play, Bogosian, Evertt explains in notes, had the store owners Pakastinis, but Evertt had to re-write portions after auditioning the two Hispanic actors and not being able to pass them by.

Finally, Genevieve Fleming, playing Erica, publicist and tag-along for “Pony”, and a rich snob with problems of her own, creates just enough tension in her face-off with Tim to leave us convinced, with Jeff, for awhile anyway, that he beat her to death in the back of a filthy van.

I wouldn’t have thought eavesdropping on a bunch of teens outside a convenience store in suburbia could ever be interesting, but then I would never try. Can you imagine pulling up a chair outside the fluorescent-filled windows and sitting there staring at a group of them? Can you imagine them carrying on as if you weren’t there staring at them? I guess that’s another way a play is like an odd kind of date: even while it’s very intimate, the other person is trained to not acknowledge you’re there at all.

Come to think of it, that’s what makes a play exactly like some dates.