Teens find their niche online

Put three adolescents with sexual secrets at computer terminals and gossip runs amok.

At least, according to Northern Light’s new production of Speech and Debate.

“It's like the Breakfast Club of this generation. If the Breakfast Club kids had to deal with impulses decided on the web, it would throw a whole new other layer into it,” says stage manager Elizabeth Allison. A former St. Albert Children's Theatre alumna, she is overseeing this one-act show at the Varscona Theatre from April 8 to 18.

American playwright Stephen Karam has crafted a dark, yet funny script that pushes boundaries as several adolescents try to out their drama teacher.

Driven by three teenage outcasts with few friends, they are the classic school stereotypes — Diwata (Kayla Gorman), an over-the-top drama geek; Howie (Geoffrey Brown), a flamboyant gay student, and Solomon (Matthew McKinney), a nerdy school reporter who smells a scoop.

Karam is a young playwright in his late twenties and has centred Speech and Debate completely in the adolescent world. “It explores that middle period between being an adult and a child, that middle ground when they are not yet ready to share,” director Trevor Schmidt explains.

The Internet brings these socially inept teenagers together, and after various machinations where they argue or hate each other they become friends.

“They are terrible to each other. They blackmail each other. They shift alliances but in all that are so desperate to want to belong to a group. The kids are horribly mean to each other, but also extremely forgiving.”

One aspect of the script that perked Allison's attention was the dialogue. “He writes how my daughter and her friends talk. I find it impressive on how he's caught the way they speak.”

Schmidt adds, “There's a young feel that's very funny. And the rhythm, the faster we play with the show, the funnier it is.”

In addition to street dialogue, the play adheres to modern conventions of multi-media use, video, slides and computers. In fact, it is through the computer's spider web that their secrets rise to the surface. “There's a constant struggle with the reality of the public Internet — about how you feel Internet chats are private, but they are not private at all,” Allison says.

And ultimately the kids are just trying to connect and find their niche. “We need to appreciate the differences and embrace them. We all went to high school with kids like this.”