BWW Reviews: Hyper-Charged PUNK ROCK Explores Uncontrolled Adolescent Dynamics

Even when it premiered in Manchester, England in 2009, all but one of the characters in Simon Stephens' hyper-charged drama, Punk Rock, had been born long after bands like The Sex Pistols and The Ramones burst onto the alternative scene.

The music they dance to between scenes in director Tripp Cullman's sizzling Off-Broadway production may have come out of their parents' collections, but the loud, aggressive rebellions of Big Black, Sonic Youth and Cows provide an excellent subtext soundtrack to their bottled up emotions anxious to explode.

Set in Stockton, outside of Manchester, the play is set in the seriously understocked library of what Americans would call a private school. The 17-year-olds of the Upper School hang out there between classes, or sometimes instead of them, without adult supervision, separated from the Lower School. Designer Mark Wendland's institutional set suggests a kind of prison where inmates are left to fend for themselves.

At first the play resembles a coming-of-age piece packed with familiar adolescent edginess. Exposition is neatly handled in the opening conversation where the nervously sensitive William (Douglas Smith) introduces cool, blasé transfer student, Lilly (Colby Minifie), to her new surroundings. Their classmates include the strutting bully Bennett (Will Pullen), his overachieving, sexually aggressive girlfriend Cissy (Lilly Englert), nerdy intellectual Chadwick (Noah Robbins), body conscious Tanya (Annie Funke) and the seemingly well-adjusted Nicholas (Pico Alexander).

Though these are academically advanced students, they are all troubled in one way or another. In the several weeks the play covers, we see the expected incidents of raging hormones, broken hearts, self-destructive behavior, homophobic self-denial, and cruel acts of dominance, and yet this group seems to stay linked together as a community until the horrifying climactic scene of violence, which is executed with convincing realism.

The ensemble is uniformly excellent, including David Greenspan as the only adult character. To explain his function would give away too much. A brief appearance is made by Sophie Shapiro as Bennett's little sister, who may wind up looking up to her big brother as a role model.

But more than tense and chilling, Punk Rock is a serious exploration of uncontrolled adolescent dynamics, attempting to explain why the unthinkable is becoming more commonplace.

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