Note: This article is a satirical piece based on season two, episode seven of “Euphoria.”
A few hours before showtime, I received two tickets to a play by East Highland High School student Lexi Howard. I was not going to attend initially, but I thought, why not go and support a local high school theater production? Maybe Howard would be reiterating “Oklahoma!” or some other basic theater fodder. While I’m no playwright, I love watching a group of dedicated kids and teachers put together something magical.
I showed up at the auditorium 20 minutes before the curtain call. I got myself and my date a drink from the concession stands and we found our seats. The entire room was buzzing with energy. Most of the crowd’s attention was diverted not to the stage but at a young couple in the center aisle. Some sour emotions were in the air, but I don’t know much about these kids or their lives. I was just there to see a good show, and what a show it was.
In all my years as an entertainment reporter, I have never been as utterly and fundamentally unprepared for a performance as I was for “Our Life.”
A budding unknown talent in the low-budget industry of high school theater, the original play written and directed by Howard is a meta-autobiographical story about her youth and development into girlhood while living in a broken family.
It opened with Howard, who served as the play’s omniscient narrator and protagonist Grace, reading a Rainer Maria Rilke poem to her drug-addicted best friend Jade, who recently lost her father to cancer. It was a dark, cold opening, but it demonstrated the misery of being a teenager amid family tragedy. Upon introducing her gang of friends — older sister Hallie, the confident Marta, Luna and Jade — the play followed a non-linear structure that chronicled the lives of her and her friends from the summer before their freshman year of high school onward.
As Grace stated during the title sequence, “This is life. Not everyone’s life, but Our Life.”
I had no idea where the theater department found such a large budget for this lavish high school play. The sets were as dynamic as they come, including a rotating school hallway and an impressive gas station rooftop. The bedroom and street sets were immaculately constructed as well. My one qualm with the production was that the lighting cues lacked much-needed speed, but the overall production and staging were top tier.
As for the story itself, it is quite moving and relatable. However, some of the plot points follow the traditionally trite tropes of high school coming-of-age stories with juvenile dialogue to boot. Still, the performances from Howard and her committed cast, especially from Ethan Daley, revamp this otherwise disjointed and clichéd story into a personal collection of observations that portray the highs and lows of burgeoning adulthood.
I was enthralled by the play’s bombastic, homoerotic performance of Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero” by the actors portraying the football team. Clad in golden spandex and shirtless, these athletes gyrate, grind and dance their hearts out in the locker room. No expense was spared for this scene. I was unaware of the true meaning of the dance number except for its surface-level satire of toxic masculinity. Whatever the inspiration, it struck a major key with the audience and myself, as everyone was cheering and clapping throughout. Nothing cynical or homophobic to be found here, though the couple from earlier must have taken something to heart as they rushed out of the theater immediately following the performance.
Lexi Howard’s “Our Life” is a theatrical, teenage fever dream that reads as rushed and self-indulgent. It has not offered anything overtly new to the table about Gen Z troubles like how life is hard, social media is terrible and that teenagers worry about how they look too much. Regardless, Howard has crafted something special that I think will resonate with young people for years to come, much more than “Oklahoma!” ever could have.
If anything, Howard has made it abundantly clear that she is a creative force that we surely will never forget in this life or our next.
Apart from the visibly frantic couple and the best seat in the house still being vacant, the crowd seemed eager to see how Howard wrapped up “Our Life.”