What a difference 12 years makes. Second Stage has had a fair amount of success exhuming plays from the previous generation, with 1970s and ’80s works like “Crimes of the Heart,” “A Soldier’s Play,” and “That Championship Season” resurfacing in recent years.

Now the theater has turned its attention to the 1990s. Not just any play from that decade but Eric Bogosian’s “subUrbia,” which caught lightning in a bottle in 1994 and gave voice to what had only recently been named Generation X, the alienated cohort of 20-somethings with lots to say and nothing to do. It opened the same year as “Reality Bites” and “Clerks” vaulted Steve Zahn into Hollywood stardom, and briefly turned Lincoln Center Theater into one of the hippest theater companies in town.

A little context is called for here, because anyone introduced to the title via Second Stage’s listless, stillborn revival would have no idea what the fuss was all about. Under the typically capable guidance of director Jo Bonney, an unmoored cast of young actors delivers a momentum-free evening of nihilism-by-numbers. Rarely has 12 years felt so far in the past.

Mr. Bogosian has reworked the text throughout (more on that soon), but the basic premise is unchanged: A long night unfolds in and near the parking lot of a suburban convenience store. Jeff (Daniel Eric Gold), a disaffected postadolescent bursting with half-digested nuggets of outrage, mediates between his two buddies, the oblivious stoner Buff (Kieran Culkin) and the volatile racist and Air Force dropout Tim (Peter Scanavino), in between fighting with his girlfriend Sooze (Gaby Hoffmann), a performance artist who longs to ditch Burnfield for artier pastures.

Their ritual of boozing and bitching the night away is disrupted by the promised arrival of Pony (Michael Esper), an old classmate who has recently hit it sort of big as a sensitive rock star. Toss in Sooze’s depressive friend Bebe (Halley Feiffer) and Pony’s nubile “publicist” Erica (Jessica Capshaw), plus equal parts beer and class resentment, and the stage is set for a scorching boom-box blast of slacker rage.

That’s the idea, at least. And that was the case back in 1994, when Mr. Zahn’s unhinged Buff and Tim Guinee’s indelible take on the self-loathing Tim dove into Mr. Bogosian’s material — some of it intentionally clichéd (“All I want to do is create something that will shatter the world”), some of it unintentionally so — and turned it into a slacker cri de coeur. (Though it seemed impossible at the time, Mr. Zahn was even funnier in the 1996 movie adaptation.)

Much discussion has centered on the rewrites Mr. Bogosian has made to update the numerous pop-culture references to 2006. A few cosmetic changes have been made, with Darfur and iPods supplanting Sarajevo and VCRs. But the larger issues remain untouched, to the detriment of the play. Sooze itches to have her voice heard beyond the confines of Burnfield; has nobody there heard of YouTube? Pony’s MTV video is a source of much oohing and aahing; when’s the last time MTV actually aired a video?

Ms. Bonney — who has found the elbow-jutting rhythms in several solo pieces by Mr. Bogosian (her husband) and has shown a real flair for youthful ensembles with works like “The Seven” and “A Soldier’s Play” — never clicks in to the play’s cadences here. The three male leads, who have presumably soaked up one another’s company night after night for years, seem to have met for practically the first time. Entrances and exits are clumsy. Mr. Culkin gets almost no laughs in the seemingly foolproof role of Buff. (To be fair, he does all right with his few more tender scenes.) And the ending, in which the Muslim store owner (Manu Narayan) berates the slackers after a tragic incident, stumps Ms. Bonney; she darts through as if she were embarrassed by it, closing out the evening on an awkward note.

A few bright spots can be found within the cast. Mr. Esper nails both the burgeoning player and the former high school dweeb in Pony; he also provides some creditable original music, a pair of chugging power-pop melodies that would do the Goo Goo Dolls proud. And Ms. Feiffer finds surprising depths of both pathos and sweetness within her relatively underdeveloped character, a thin-skinned recovering addict.

For the most part, though, the sun rises on “subUrbia” and casts it in a very unflattering light. The beer got warm some time ago, and too much of Mr. Bogosian’s dialogue has blurred into white noise. Reality may bite, but this gang lacks the teeth to bite back.

***

Ventriloquism may have been regarded as a dark art for much of its surprisingly storied history (dating back to the Oracles at Delphi), but Jay Johnson makes it seem like the lightest, most satisfying thing in the world in his hugely ingratiating “Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!”

Standing among dozens of beat-up trunks, the amiable Mr. Johnson still looks boyish (if a tad paunchier) almost 30 years after starring on “Soap.” His onstage persona will be familiar to anyone who’s seen sleight-of-hand wizard Ricky Jay or freak-show enthusiast Todd Robbins: Mr. Johnson is a walking encyclopedia of historical tidbits about the field who can also perform it with the best of them.

One thing he isn’t, however, is a voice-thrower. Not literally, at least. As Mr. Johnson points out in the show, the illusion of a sound coming from elsewhere on the stage actually comes through … well, it wasn’t entirely clear, but it has something to do with amplitude. Or maybe frequency. One of them slows down, and suddenly the sound seems to emanate from 10 inches to the right of Mr. Johnson’s mouth (as with most of his “dummies,” a term that Mr. Johnson avoids out of respect) or, somewhat alarmingly, from several feet below.

This skill is evident throughout “The Two and Only!,” as Mr. Johnson shuffles fairly comfortably among personal biography, ventriloquism history, and comedy sketches involving puppets of birds, monkeys, snakes, and dummies — sorry, alter egos. All three components get a light comedic touch, with a number of decent laughs (“What’s the most important thing about being a vulture? Location, location, location!”) and almost as many groaners (“Ventriloquism flourished in the Dark Ages because who could see their lips move?”).

While the material may vary in quality, Mr. Johnson’s rapport with the audience and with his puppets is consistently superb. Best of all is his account of the generation-spanning friendship he struck up as a teenager with Arthur Sieving, a 70-year-old puppet maker who became Mr. Johnson’s mentor from afar. Mr. Johnson’s tale blossoms into a moving testament to the glories of passing the torch of expertise. The show’s title, in fact, stems from a silly yet sweet interaction between Mr. Johnson and Squeaky, the puppet Sieving created for him.

Mr. Johnson is a charming tour guide and quite, quite good at what he does. When he describes the “Soap” sound crew mistakenly moving the boom microphone away from Mr. Johnson’s mouth and toward Bob’s, the error seems completely understandable. And when he and Bob “swap voices,” the effect is truly creepy. But Mr. Johnson is not the sort to leave his audience creeped out. And so he recounts a touching story of homecoming involving his real-life Geppetto, Sieving. Even if voices can’t be thrown, Mr. Johnson reminds us, with an irresistible blend of schmaltz and savvy, they can be heard from a great distance.

“subUrbia” until October 29 (307 W. 43rd St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-246-4422).

“Jay Johnson: The Two and Only!” Open run (240 W. 44th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).