Those who became adults during World War I have been dubbed The Lost Generation, but as playwright Steve McMahon depicts today’s teens — the so-called Gen Z — in his new play two of us on the run, they are every bit as lost and rudderless.
Certainly that is the case with Catherine and Jennifer, a pair of 16-year-olds, best friends by default, restless at home and eager to hit the road in search of some freedom and adventure. For Catherine, who readily admits she is not very bright, it would be a chance to live the life of Thelma and Louise, the iconic movie characters played on screen by Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis. But Cat concedes she never watched the film all the way through, so she has no idea that her celluloid role models meet a downbeat ending.
McMahon’s conclusion for his two road trippers is more ambiguous. We are shown several violent endings to their saga, but as Jennifer informs us in one of her several direct address monologues, most of what we have just seen may never have happened. It is entirely possible that the events of two of us on the run come from the two teens’ lurid imaginations, which makes the 80-minute tale rather toothless.
The play is now receiving its world premiere at Florida Atlantic University Theatre Lab following a developmental reading in the company’s 2023 New Play Festival. It is a view of American life in the era of Trump as seen by McMahon, a Scottish transplant to this country, decades older than his fictional characters. Most of Theater Lab’s audience is also far older than Catherine and Jennifer, a fact that must leave them with a feeling of relief.
The production, directed with a jaundiced eye by Margaret M. Ledford, progresses in short, choppy scenes that bring to mind panels of a graphic novel. Between the scenes, a couple of electronic billboards display product ads, perhaps an intended statement on consumerism or perhaps not.
In any event, Cat and Jen (or C and J as the program designates them) spend a lot of time mulling what to pack for their journey, whether or not feminists use makeup or care about hygiene and if they are up to robbing banks, an acknowledgement of yet another pair of role models — Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. In further foreshadowing of possible mayhem ahead, they visit a library where Jen steals a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. What could go wrong?
FAU alumna Kimmie Harvey takes charge of the road trip and of the production as the more grounded Jen, making decisions for the two of them, but clearly making it up as she goes along. As flightier Cat, Lynn University grad Abbie Fricke aptly conveys the little girl inside the teen creeping tentatively towards womanhood. The two relatively untested actresses have substantial stage presence and what minor appeal the production musters comes from the performers. Late in the play, they stop at a bar and encounter a bartender — curiously uncredited in the program — to whom a tipsy Cat decides to lose her virginity. Unless he is a figment of her imagination, too.
two of us on the run is in the well-trod tradition of elders looking on askance at the antics of a younger generation. Perhaps Gen Z is more lost than its predecessors, or perhaps this is just the latest in a long line of adolescents going through growing pains.
TWO OF US ON THE RUN, Florida Atlantic University Theatre Lab, Parliament Hall, FAU Campus, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Through Sunday, Feb. 16. $35-$45. Call 561-297-6124 or visit the Theatre Lab website.