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As the story goes, Canadian playwright George F. Walker, born and raised in Toronto’s industrialized inner city, was driving a cab in the early 1970s when he saw a poster for a local theater company requesting original scripts.  

Walker went home and wrote his play “Prince of Naples,” which began a long relationship with Toronto’s Factory Theatre Lab, where he eventually became playwright-in-residence, and later artistic director.  

Since then, Walker’s plays have been performed around the world. On Thursday, Berkeley’s Aurora Theater Company opened an energetic production of his 1993 script “Tough!” 

Running 90 minutes without an intermission, “Tough!” eavesdrops on the lives of three lower-class 19 year olds hanging out in a rundown inner city park, arguing about the unhappy romantic relationship between two of them. 

On designer Melpomene Katakalos’ effectively depressing set littered with trash and cigarette butts, angry, foul-mouthed homegirl Tina (Amanda Duarte) insults her ne’er-do-well boyfriend Bobby (Danny Wolohan) over the fact that he has a roving eye, and has been caught at a party fooling around with another woman. 

Before long, it turns out that Tina is pregnant.  

With the support of Tina’s angry, vicious friend Jill (Maria Candelaria), the two women lace into the simpleton Bobby, and spend much of the 90 minutes giving him a serious tongue-lashing. 

At one point, friend Jill beats up Bobby physically. Jill, it turns out, has hated Bobby since they were both five years old. 

The play covers a lot of gender politics, going over the differences between men and women when it comes to sex and romance. 

It also covers a lot of socio-economic ground – about how youths in this deprived environment have little in the way of future prospects. A single mother faces a life of welfare. A young man with no skills has little hope for economic betterment.  

As the story opens up, Bobby and Tina let out some of their dreams. 

Sometimes the play is funny. These streetwise inner city youth are not unlike the foul-mouthed characters who populate such David Mamet plays as “American Buffalo.” 

But for me, “Tough!” doesn’t quite click, at least in this Aurora production under the direction of Søren Oliver. 

For one, the 1993 story of teen parenting already seems slightly out of date in terms of the social mores of today’s youth. Second, the play feels more like an adult writing about youth, than about youth. 

One big question that kept occurring to me was why Bobby would sit there for more than an hour and take the abuse that’s heaped on him by these two women, rather than just leave. 

In terms of the character that director Oliver and actor Wolohan have created for Bobby, it makes more sense that he would just leave. 

Also, the dialogue in “Tough!” takes a form in which the characters tend to describe the type of people they are, and describe the type of people others are, and explain what everyone’s motivations are. This doesn’t make the best stage dialogue. 

The script feels like it is conscious of being an illustration of the sociology of youth behavior in this socio-economic class. 

In fact, there is a didactic, rather than dramatic, quality to the dialogue, as the characters talk about the limits of their world, and the types of people they are. 

“Tough!” is an actors’ play, with lots of latitude for performers to create much of the characters, but the chemistry in this production just doesn’t quite jell. 

As pregnant Tina, Duarte often seems to be in a world of forced melodramatic emotions. Wolohan’s simpleton Bobby doesn’t feel connected to anything. 

Candelaria’s angry, foul-mouthed Jill is potentially the most interesting character of the evening, but except for a moment at the end, she stays at the same angry pitch all the way through. 

The physical fighting doesn’t work well either. When Jill beats up Bobby, who is someone much larger than she, it’s hard to accept. 

So in the final analysis, the Mamet-like sound and fury of "Tough!" that starts out promising, doesn’t offer fresh or interesting characters in what turns out to be a pedantic, sociological script. 

“Tough!,” presented by Aurora Theater at the Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Avenue, through March 4. Call (510) 843-4822 or visit www.auroratheatre.org.