Re-enter adolesence. Re-enter the 1980s. A group of American high school students has one final night to themselves after a long week of sight-seeing and cultural education in England. (Bor-ing!) Inexplicably, they've been left alone at a B+B by their teachers and, fortuitiously (for the kids), by the staff as well. Enter alcohol, cigarettes and pot. Enter leg-warmers, hair scarves, 80's pop-music and more of the colour pink than a Cyndi Lauper music video. And let the fun begin. (Meaning, talks about sex and parents).

The boys are played to humorous effect as dim-witted and bumbling. The only complexity we get is from the teacher's son. He struggles awkwardly to balance a genuine respect for his father with the necessary disdain of teachers required to be liked. The high-light of the boys' performances is an overly-enthusiastic, hip-thrusting sex-demonstration, which the girls help carry off with their amused, but coy reactions.

The girls, on the other hand, play a variety of emotions and types of characters. Earlier in the day, one of the girls was nearly molested by one of her teachers. We see the pain from her telling about the experience as much in her tears as in the sympathy and care the other girls give her. The subject moves on to, "walking in on your parents having sex", (which apparently is a lot more common than you'd think). The young actors are most at home in these moments, laughing genuinely with each other at the horrible trauma that-so the joke goes-parental sex is to an adolescent. The adult world in this play feels removed and, as far as the kids are concerned, so much the better. At least so much the better for that night: a couple girls let it slip that they really do miss home, but we're never really sure why.

The most engaging scene in the play is when the room is cleared of all the chaos and a boy and a girl are left alone on the couch. Through her speedy dialogue, the girl is both aloof and distant, and yet full of bright smiles and giggles. So when she finally says, almost off-handedly, "Put your arm around me.and don't say anything!" we feel the boy's shocked excitement break through the nevrous tension. Of couse, she is the one who leans into him affectionately and he just sort of holds her.

Their conversation continues nonchalantly, while the narrator, who opens each scene in the play with a brief, (if superflous) descripition of what will follow, skillfully interjects descriptions of the sexual intimacy that he knows will follow the conversation. We never see anything more than this, but the timing and tone of the narration gives the casual conversation a heigtened, sexual significance. This device is used again at the play's end to juxtapose a frozen kiss with the narrator's revelation that, though she doesn't know it yet, the girl got pregnant that very night and will give-birth in nine-months.

As it turns out, the narrator has actually been telling the story of how his own parents conceived him-the boy and girl were his parents. Thus, the play is a search for his own identity. Similarly, the distance from their parents at home is likened to the distance from their true identity that is symptomatic of adolesence. By understanding our parents we are supposed to understand ourselves better. However, parents are just what this play lacks and the complex identity of these kids just what we never learn. What we are left with are some amusing and apt representations of teenage life, not teenagers themselves.

Oliver Morrison