American Idiot: When You're Not Quite Sure Who the Enemy Is

My scenic artist friend who helped punk up the St. James theater for the Green Day musical gave me a ticket to go see American Idiot last night. Among mostly people of my age (mid-to-late twenties to early thirties), many of whom were pretty heavily tattooed with gauged ears, or large ear holes indicating that their ears were once gauged, I couldn't help but wonder who the show was actually for. Is Green Day's new material relevant to any one at all? Their music hasn't matured with their fan base and it seems, to me at least, that they're probably a bit too old to attract the teeny bopper crowd.

Anyway, I grew up on Green Day and I'm assuming that most of the crowd did too. I didn't expect much and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.  The actors were good, their voices well-trained and well-suited for the pop punk they belted. The set was smart, and was probably the real star of the production. Televisions dotted the walls from floor to ceiling, broadcasting snippets of Family Guy, dream sequences, and news reports from the ground in Iraq. The wall projected a bus ride from the mundane suburban hell most of our protagonists were fleeing in favor of the big city.





The requisite characters were covered--punk turned army boy, punk turned heroin addict, and punk turned ill-prepared father. The protagonist, Johnny (aforementioned punk turned heroin addict), laments and laments, but his gripes are poignantly hollow. He sounds like the narrator of the "Detachable Penis" song. He knows he is ridiculous, but he can't help being sad. He has no passion, no direction, except for a girl who he has sex with and tries to stab, whose name he later forgets.

When she has gone, and his friends who have not stayed behind to raise a child or gone off to war after watching a television commercial, have also mysteriously vanished, Johnny decides to kick his dope habit. He puts on a white collared shirt and takes a desk job.

You'd think it would be the loss of everyone close to him and the debilitating heroin addiction that would send Johnny home, but the desk job was his rock bottom.

A few days under the fluorescent lights sent him back to the suburban wasteland to be reunited with friend turned father and friend turned amputee. After soliloquies and songs directed towards the "enemy," there is no vanquishing. Raised fists and anarchy symbols and safety pins flash on the television screens in neon colors, but these kids don't care to talk about workers' rights (seems they never really work). The moral in the end, I guess, is that they have each other...and pop punk.

So, the plot was a bit muddled and it was a bit cheesy (down to the chance to graffiti the wall downstairs...it felt like a vacation to a bathroom in Brooklyn), but it was entertaining and a lot of it was spot on. The final message was one of target-less rebellion--the urge to fight the good fight regardless of whether or not you can answer the question, "what are we fighting for?".