Be More Chill

WHO’S ON FIRST? Caroline Neff helps Cohen cover his bases.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

In Ned Vizzini’s quirky 2005 young-adult novel, a misfit adolescent attempts to circumvent high school’s merciless clique culture by swallowing a computer chip–imbedded pill that lodges in his brain and instructs him on how to be cool and get laid. The 27-year-old New Yorker’s teen-angst morality tale is already being retooled for Hollywood by High Fidelity screenwriter Steve Pink.

Which helps explain why Griffin’s stage adaptation—while nimbly directed by Berry, who keeps his youthful cast emotionally invested and firing on all cylinders—feels like a patented John Hughes formula tricked out with hip-hop slang and a digital-age Faustian alter-ego plot twist. Massolia’s main contribution is to personify the AI chip (a Matrix-pirated device that speaks to protagonist Jeremy in the clipped voice of Keanu Reeves) as a black-trench-coated Cyrano de Bergerac for whom women are merely “targets.” And Edward Paul, as the so-called Squip, pulls off that tall order, striking Neo poses and talking Jeremy (an amiably awkward Jake Cohen) through such amusing contemporary rites of passage as groping a pierced nipple.

Despite its turgid second act and a story line telegraphed from start to finish (nutshell: Jeremy learns it’s better to be yourself than act like a dick to win the girl), Chill comes off as above-average fare for urban teen audiences. Though some parents might blanch at the sporadic sex, drugs and profanity, those elements are pretty PG and certainly nothing that Sebastian—the teen I brought to the show, who thoroughly dug it and felt it accurately depicted his world—hadn’t seen before.