Always looking for resolution where there is/are none?

If you're looking for two-and-a-half hours of heart-wrenching, head-hurting, emotionally-riling insight into the controversial, gritty, high-blood-pressure, contentious, deeply ("weighty") disturbing, unrelenting, tumultuous world of high-schoolers, then please go see Yellowjackets at the Berkeley Rep.

I'm not quite sure I can explain what the play is about. All I know is that the play unrelentlessly tackles extremely tough issues in an uncomprisingly smart way. That the play is set in Berkeley High makes the play even more amazing -- b/c surprisingly I had forgotten that even high school students deal with big issues. What am I saying! Teenagers deal with bigger issues than adults do sometimes. That's the point. Teens grapple with weighty issues (violence, racism, sex) every day and we can't simply say "they're too young to have such issues." And Yellowjackets shows us, too, that sometimes (oftentimes?) adults have no idea how to deal with the fall-out.

This is what I think of the play (by 30-yr-old genius Itamar Moses, who makes me cry just thinking about how talented he is), which has already been eloquently stated by the Examiner:

“Provocative and involving…the lightning-paced dialogue and slam-bang scene changes keep the play hurtling forward at breakneck speed…It’s smart, political, contentious, relentless, confusing and so full of weighty issues you may forget you’re actually dealing with teenagers here.”—Examiner.com

The play was stunning. Several times throughout the evening, I found myself holding my breath b/c of the emotions gushing out in the words being spewed out at breakneck speed. At one point, I wanted to jump up and shout at the characters. During one scene in the second act, I was so caught up in the moment that I actually believed something off-stage was happening for real (I started looking around for cops (b/c of the flashing lights) and realized, with chagrin, that I was totally fooled into thinking we really were watching a teen rebel being arrested by cops for trying to climb a fence).

Itamar Moses has captured in the microcosm of one high school (set in 1994) the entire gravity of our humanity. Please, please go see this smart, smart play.

If you don't believe me, read what the critics are saying.

Yellowjackets will be playing at the Berkeley Rep through October 12th.

Itamar Moses, Playwright : Itamar Moses is the author of the full-length plays Bach at Leipzig, Back Back Back, Celebrity Row, Completeness, The Den, The Four of Us, Outrage, the musical Reality! (with Gaby Alter) and various short plays and one-acts. His work has appeared off-Broadway and elsewhere in New York, at regional theatres across the country and in Canada, and is published by Faber & Faber and Samuel French. Itamar holds an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from New York University and has taught playwriting at Yale and NYU. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, MCC Playwrights’ Coalition and Naked Angels Writers Group, and is a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. Itamar was born in Berkeley and now lives in Brooklyn.