boshua | ALL NEW PEOPLE

Playwright Zach Braff is best known for his role as Dr. John Dorian in the television series Scrubs, as a writer and director of indie works however, he has gained a cult following over the years and in 2011, he wrote his first and so far only play: All New People. This morbidly funny play is about the trendy new existential condition of being young and doing ok. The play is about that generation of thirty-somethings that seem to do perfectly all right in their lives but don’t: the generation Y that has to invent their “mal de vivre” in order to feel real. Adorable and miserable are sometimes just too close for comfort.

It is the dead of winter, and the summer vacation getaway of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, is desolate and blanketed in snow. Charlie is 35, disillusioned and suicidal, and needs some time away from the rest of the world. The island ghost-town seems to be the perfect escape and certainly the perfect spot to say “Goodbye, cruel world”. He is having a last cigarette, when his exit is rudely interrupted by the flustered appearance of Emma, an overexcited and drug-loving young Englishwoman, who is survival-jobbing as an estate agent. And she will not be the last uninvited guest. A motley parade of misfits show up and change the grumpy and moody suicide candidate’s plans: a hired beauty, the town fireman (also acting as the bourgeois’ drug dealer during the summer months) and the eccentric Brit desperately trying to stay in the country. The most un-related people find themselves thrown together in a beach house (that belongs to none of them) where the mood is anything but sunny…

All New People is first and foremost an upbeat comedy, a piece of pure entertainment. On a second level though, it plays sensitively with the ridiculousness and meaninglessness of this generation’s existence and thus manages to touch that simple sensibility of everyday life.

The discovery of those everyday people, and what their REAL story is, in contrast to the characters they pretend to be, is what makes this play intriguing and challenging. It’s a pure, fun, yet sensitive character play that shows, despite all of its very theatrical coincidences, a genuineness in dealing with those seemingly meaningless struggles of generation Y that might just be a desperate struggle to fill a blank.