With the attitude-laden title of “Once and for All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen,” a theatrical piece that has its New York premiere on Thursday, a little history is in order.
There is action in “Once and for All We're Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen.”
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Alexander Devriendt directs “Once,” giving it structure.
Let us go back almost three years to a lazy Sunday, following a raucous Saturday night in the small Belgian city of Ghent. Some exuberant teenage actors would not sit in their chairs and be still while participating in a project conducted by Alexander Devriendt, the artistic director of the Ontroerend Goed performance group.
As the actors did their thing — hitting one another, gossiping, tipping over in their chairs — Mr. Devriendt realized that the play he was seeking about the energy, rebelliousness and possibilities of youth was right there in the behavior and attitudes of the young people just being themselves.
“In other productions, when youngsters were put onstage, I never saw that brutal energy,” Mr. Devriendt said about his quest for a theater project about the teenage years that was neither saccharine nor nihilistic, but rather reflected the complexity of the search of identity and the need to experiment.
“Once” (which is not its original, untranslatable Dutch title) became the hit of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe two summers ago. It has collected glowing reviews for its spontaneity and energy as it has toured throughout much of Europe — Italy, Britain, Ireland and Portugal — as well as Australia. Most of the original cast members are still part of the show.
Presented by the New Victory Theater at the Duke on 42nd Street as part of the Under the Radar stage festival, “Once” features 13 young actors onstage with an array of improbable props: a garbage bag, balloons, pom-poms, a skateboard, an all-terrain vehicle. The only constants are the 13 mismatched chairs in which they sit. Sometimes. Mostly in their actions and in a handful of monologues and dialogue, they convey their feelings about the teenage years, when you do not exactly know who you are but do not want to be your parents.
Mr. Devriendt, the 33-year-old founder of Ontroerend Goed and four cast members were discussing the show in an interview a few hours before a rehearsal on Tuesday night. Mr. Devriendt recalled how he found his actors at the Kopergietery, a youth theater in Ghent. He gave them free reign as they tried out ideas (“Just don’t hurt anyone,” he said) and took them shopping for the props, which they selected themselves.
“That Sunday afternoon it became clear,” said Ian Ghysels, a curly-haired 17-year-old actor. “He had put the chairs onstage, but we kept messing around. We were all hung over. I was collecting my saliva.”
During the performance the teenagers fight, make out, dance, tip over in their chairs, get high. Stopping every now and then to address the audience or one another, throwing props from offstage, they are accompanied by an eclectic musical score that veers from Peggy Lee to Lou Reed.
Suddenly an alarm bleats, and they exit the stage, returning to repeat variations of the same high jinks. At one point they dance. Another time they fight. They play out a cheerfully fake family scenario. And so on for about an hour.
If it seems natural, it is because the actors play themselves. The playbill credits Mr. Devriendt, the writer Joeri Smet and the cast for conceiving and designing the show. Mr. Devriendt imposed structure on the action, but what’s onstage sprang from the actors, nine young women and four young men, who mostly range in age from 14 to 19. (Mr. Devriendt said there might be a 20-year-old somewhere in the bunch by now.)
One of them, Charlotte De Bruyne, recalled how the young actors wanted to be cool for Mr. Devriendt but also just wanted to be themselves. That duality is part of adolescence, the young actors agreed, but the play is not so much a heavy-handed message as it is a representation of the need for adolescents to experiment, mess up, start over.
“We don’t want a definition of teenagers,” said Ms. De Bruyne, a 19-year-old who studies drama in Ghent. “I have the feeling that the definition of teenager is just not possible. People forget that it’s also about individuals.”
Listen to Ms. De Bruyne onstage.
“We are, well, adolescents,” she says, adding that the term is a cliché but that she does not mind clichés. “Looking at us, you have to start feeling old, or to envy us that we are able to start over again.”
Near the end of the show Nathalie Verbeke implores the audience: “Let me be. Please. Let me be.”
She will come home late, she says, she will be drunk, she will have to “go too far.”