"Stupid Kids": Angsty, antsy teens in an '80s wasteland

Let's say you fast-forward the James Dean movie "Rebel Without a Cause" about 30 years into the future, so now it takes place at a suburban American high school in the 1980s. And you restock the local jukebox with angsty indy rock singles by the Smiths, the Pixies and Culture Club. Then you banish all the teachers and parents, and rejigger the sexual politics.

John C. Russell (a promising playwright who died at 31 of AIDS, in 1994) did just that in "Stupid Kids," which debuted Off Broadway in 1998 and has found the right berth in Seattle, at Empty Space Theatre.

Quirky, histrionic and maybe nostalgic (for those who spent their youth relating to the Violent Femmes tune "Kiss Off," or the Pixies' "Where is My Mind?" ), Russell's script affectionately tilts the high school rebel-teen genre into a 90-minute play-with-music about the unholy alliance of two glam rebels and two gay misfits.

In fact, this raging-hormones fable could easily be retitled "Revenge of the Gay Outcasts."

That isn't so evident in the show's hard-rocking, choral-anguish opening, which crosses "Rebel Without a Cause" and John Hughes' "The Breakfast Club."

Four kids at bland, suburban Joe McCarthy High (yup) meet in juvey detention and establish their maverick credentials for us by sassing adult authorities (but quivering in fear of their parents' wrath).

The leaders of the pack: new-kid-in-town Jim Stark (played with sexy-surly panache by Lathrop Walker), and the top girl/drama queen Judy Noonan (the adroitly comic Jeanette Maus) — who bear the same names (and some of the same traits) as the James Dean and Natalie Wood characters in "Rebel."

Completing the foursome: two true iconoclasts who become the sidekicks and unrequited worshipers of Jim and Judy, Neechee Crawford (played to the hilt by Louis Hobson, as a Boy George-ish twist on Sal Mineo's Plato in "Rebel") and Kimberly Willis. (In Megan Hill's magnetic turn, she's someone who couldn't have existed in the 1950s — a Patti Smith-worshiping, fiercely feminist riot girl).

Backed by the hot, tight electric quartet Chapstick, this snappy young cast has a field day biting into the hyper-ventilating dialogue, over-amped emotions and punchy songs by '80s rockers which "Stupid Kids" both parodies and enshrines.

And though the piece is sharply staged by Adam Greenfield, the actors also get to free-range around Etta Lilienthal's dingy two-level set, like jungle animals on the prowl.

Even so, the balancing of parody and pathos in Russell's text is often self-conscious and herky-jerky, during the 90-minute show's first half. Then you get the hang of the schizzy transitions between operatic intensity ("My tears are making the world shake!" howls Judy, in a typical aria of self-pity), and hey-dude-whatever lassitude.

And as the short scenes and songs coalesce into a story, "Stupid Kids" gets funnier and more engrossing.

Jim turns out to be not such a rebel after all: he willingly submits to ritual humiliations to gain "sanction" from the school's hoodlum aristocracy. And Judy's narcissism zooms off the charts.

Neechee and Kimberly share their flamingly bad poetry — and their gathering doubts about whether Judy or Jim deserve their lustful devotion. And they stumble into the mature realization that some people just fake being outcasts, while others can't help it. And, as the old bard Bob Dylan once put it, "To live outside the law you must be honest."

The one thing that doesn't quite ring true here is Neechee and Kimberly's mutual sexual rejection, after mutually coming out as gay. But perhaps that's just because Hobson (though heavily mascara'd and insanely mannered) and the boho-cool Hill have hotter stage chemistry than Stark's hunky Jim and Maus' preening Judy.

Chalk up another win for high school "losers."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com