Mama Tried | Hannah Gold
Every Kenneth Lonergan production is, at its center, a story of nihilism resisted or indulged. Usually the characters engaged in these struggles haven’t yet made it out of their twenties. In his breakout play, This Is Our Youth (1996), about newly minted high school graduates wallowing around the Upper West Side, nineteen-year-old Jessica Goldman flirts at once with her crush and with the void. The fact that people change, sometimes dramatically, as they age distresses her to no end. “It just basically invalidates whoever you are right now,” she tells her love interest, local fuckup Warren Straub. “It just makes your whole self at any given point in your life seem so completely dismissable. So it’s like, what’s the point?” Lonergan gave himself a bit part in his first feature film, You Can Count on Me (2000), as a chill small-town priest named Ron who makes house calls in a plaid shirt. Dropping in one day on aimless, troublemaking Terry (Mark Ruffalo), at the behest of his concerned older sister (Laura Linney), Ron urges the faithless young man not …