Following the short film My Trip to Spain, Theda Hammel and John Early continue their creative collaboration with the deliciously dark and hilarious 2020-set comedy feature Stress Positions, which world premiered at Sundance and was the closing night selection of MOMA’s New Directors/New Films festival. As well as writing and directing, Hammel also serves as editor and composer, and stars as Karla, an acerbic but lovable message therapist and best friend to the highly-strung fellow aging millennial Terry (John Early, who also produces). As we meet Terry, he has just moved into his wealthy ex’s vacant Brooklyn brownstone party house in the early months of the pandemic. With their divorce papers waiting to be signed, Terry’s stress levels mount as he struggles to cope with pressure of complying with Covid precautions (and everyone else’s nonchalance about them), saying the right thing in a summer of political activism, and caring for his beautiful teenage nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a model who has moved in with him while his broken leg heals.
As Stress Positions begins its US theatrical release from April 19th in New York, before opening in Los Angeles and other select cities from April 26th, Theda Hammel and John Early speak exclusively with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about how they first met, their approach to using the period details of summer 2020 in the film, and bonding over creating refreshingly messy and flawed LGBTQ+ characters.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: how did you two first meet and begin collaborating?
John Early: “I was working on the front desk at the Atlantic Theater Company after completing my training there and Theda was doing the summer intensive. I still have vivid memories of her when I was at the front desk. I remember the twinkle in her eyes and a kind of subtle mischievousness. We were both very devoted to that program—and both had very transformative experiences there artistically—but it was heavily built on the principles of discipline and I immediately felt like I had an ally in Theda in some of my more subversive tendencies. So that’s where we met. Then Theda was the assistant director on a production of Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in which I played many different characters and played the snare drum wearing a Henley.”
Theda Hammel: “A beautiful Henley, a really flattering Henley.”
John: “Thank you! That’s where we truly started to hang out, extracurricularly, and from then we went on to be great friends. Theda was my thankless sidekick for a variety show in Midtown for years.”
Theda: “That was the best gig. It was the best show.”
John: “We really had the time of our lives and got to talk on stage together.”
Theda: “I never get to be drunk on stage anymore. It’s so sad. I loved it.”
John: “It was so crazy, we were really drunk, but even there—in a really debaucherous, silly variety show setting—Theda was always able to elevate what I was doing, or to locate the deeper critique in my clowning and help expand upon it conversationally and deliver it to the audience. I think that’s what Stress Positions does too. Theda takes this clown thing that I do and elevates it and contextualizes it in something very deep. We also worked together on a play. I produced a revival of a Wallace Shawn’s Marie and Bruce, which was all Theda’s idea and she played Marie in it. That was in 2018 and it was the real beginning of a more serious collaboration between us. So that’s our little history.”
Theda: “Coming together for that and basking in the glow of Wallace Shawn’s play brought us together.”
Theda, is there anything you want to add about first meeting John or why this collaboration between you works?
Theda: “My first exposure to John’s performing was his audition for the romantic lead in Chalk Circle. He gave the most beautiful, romantic, tender, sincere, sweet, incredible audition with this scene of a love parting. He didn’t get the role and he had to play the drum instead, but my first impression of John was of an extremely gifted, gorgeous actor. Then it came as a huge surprise to me the extent to which he was so funny. So John’s comic gifts have always been a delightful surprise for me because my first impression was of somebody who was such an amazing actor and I think we’re using both of those things in this movie.”
I love the friction between your characters in Stress Positions which really charges the energy. There’s a best frenemies, sort of sibling thing going on in some ways. What was it like to create that onscreen relationship?
Theda: “I just remember it being very easy to act with you.”
John: “Yeah, it was the thing that we gave the least attention to and I think that’s why it’s good.”
Theda: “We had a lot of other things to do in the middle of all the acting. John was also a producer on the movie and was interfacing with everybody. I was directing and trying to deal with all of that. So it felt like the moments of serenity and tranquility and peace were in the actual scenes together.”
John: “I agree. I also think it’s nice how Karla really warms Terry. In the privacy of their friendship, he can drop his proud matriarch role, let his guard down and be a little nastier and at least get it out.”
Theda: “Yes! When I hang out with the people that I knew in my 20s, when I was a nightlife drunk, I can have fun in a way that I don’t have access to now in my professional, normal life. In the movie, when Karla comes over to the house and offers Terry alcohol, he goes, ‘I’m cutting back’. She then holds the glass right under his mouth, he takes it and he starts drinking from it. One of the main things there is that she’s giving him permission to relax and drink. He proceeds to get very drunk, almost blackout drunk. He’s so happy to have this person who is a little bit of a thorn in his side, but who is this drinking friend. One of my favorite parts of the movie is the way that Karla gives him permission to actually relax and be the kind of person that maybe he was in his 20s, when what he’s trying to do at the start of the movie is be like, ‘clean slate, new me, no more fun, no more party’.”
I love the way that you use the summer 2020 details in Stress Positions, it’s never just about period setting, it always amps up the humor and adds to what’s going on. What was your approach to that aspect of the film?
Theda: “The fear of contamination is there in the sense of the pandemic—in all of the masking and wiping and spraying and distancing and all that kind of stuff— but the fear of contamination is also of more general concern in the movie. For example, there is a little thing—it’s not totally consistent throughout the movie—but whenever somebody is exposed to a sexually lurid thought there is a cough there. The fear is almost of being contaminated by the wrong form of desire, saying the wrong thing, or embodying an ideology that you don’t want to be associated with. So there is this distancing that happens in all of those respects. That’s how I see the virus playing out in the movie. It’s an analogy for this fear of moral contamination that comes from the outside or from within oneself.”
John: “I understand in theory why people making work about this time have avoided the stuff that’s maybe highly comedic, because it’s also a time that’s associated with mass death. But I think there was a larger cultural repression then too. That was a strangely sublimated time. There was a very strange quality to that time with the posturing that we did about COVID safety versus the totally unavoidable looseness that would happen at home. Like the logic of spraying down vegetables immediately fell apart and you’d be touching the wrong thing and then be like, ‘Oh, well, whatever!'”
“There was the political moment of everyone using their social media for the good of the culture and also behind closed doors feeling kind of queasy about social media, about the kind of the forced social participation in the discourse. We were very unintegrated in that moment and that is always a great starting point for comedy but it wasn’t being done during that time. I was so excited by the kind of Noises Off quality of this script, with the slamming doors and the different floors and the spraying down. That was real, that was happening.”
I love how messy and flawed your characters are in Stress Positions. With New Queer Cinema we got a rebellion against characters having to be socially acceptable and it feels like maybe over recent years we’ve gone that way again, that characters have to be a little bit more socially acceptable. I think that’s why I found these characters so refreshing. How conscious were you of that in creating Karla and Terry?
Theda: “There was a lot of work done in the 2010s in terms of this new visibility, especially with let’s say trans characters on screen, to try and reverse the horrible way that trans people had been characterized up to that point. I don’t know if it was effective in the long run for trans rights because with every bit of visibility there’s an increased risk of backlash, and we’ve certainly seen that recently and I expect to see it again. But within the world of media and movies, I thought enough work had been done that I actually could characterize a trans lady on screen in this way; behaving badly and also, I would say, what’s maybe even more uncomfortable about it is, behaving badly and being likable and charismatic and funny. I thought that it could work and I think it’s hitting at the right moment in in the evolution of mainstream trans representation. I think it’s situated right where it needs to be.”
John: “I think that part of why Theda and I initially became friends is that as people who wanted to make art we both felt this mounting pressure in the culture for that art to be an artifact of this moment and queer visibility and representation matters. I think we were very angry about that and maybe still are, but maybe this film helped us to work through some of that anger and express some of that anger and we’ll move on.”
Theda: “Queer was originally a derogative term and then it became a term of nobility and the you started hearing this phrase queer joy. Well, you can talk about queer joy all you want, but only at the expense of talking about the other half of queerness which is actually furtive and dangerous and permanently forbidden or left off-stage. If you have a stage that is the mainstream, only the half of queerness that is acceptable to the mainstream will be brought on stage. The part of it that has to do with forbidden, illicit desires, that will never be socially acceptable, and that doom you just as a virtue of having them, that part of queerness is not going to be brought on stage. Biden is not going to bring that kind of queerness on stage.”
“Here, it’s not like anything horribly taboo or despicable happens in this movie, but it’s that people’s emotions are unacceptable to themselves. John’s character Terry is very clearly burying or repressing a thought in this movie and that thought is, ‘I have a very handsome young man in my house. He is a model. I have a basically naked model in my house right now. He’s my nephew, so it’s not acceptable to think of him in that way’. Which is true, right? But Terry is not somebody who’s very good at sorting that through. So the more he pushes down on that thought, the more people start popping in and saying the exact same thing: ‘Wow, there’s a really handsome man in your house’ and ‘he must be very handsome, I can’t wait to meet him’.”
“Terry has to fend off all of those people until finally at the end of the movie that thought comes out in a very strange and pitiable way. There is a gesture from Terry to Bahlul that is both a little bit lured and very intimate, very lonely. I think that when I’m talking about that kind of thing, I’m talking about queerness in the way that I want to, not in terms of queer joy or in terms of visibility or representation, but in terms of a moral sexual taboo and that activates the movie.”
John: “Basically, my whole career is about playing the unlikable gay and that is a prison of my own making. It is what I am drawn to doing as a good little Presbyterian from the South. So I’ve done plenty of that. But what was so exciting to me about Stress Positions was that Theda’s script goes one step further. Like she’s saying, Karla is lovable and that’s what’s actually subversive about her. She’s really lovable and actually warm and is the social lubricant that makes these otherwise antagonistic characters come together in unexpected ways. I also think—and if this is not the case, it’s only a failure of my performance, not of Theda’s writing—that there is a kind of ‘poor Terry’ quality that is ironic at the top of the movie when you’re laughing at his expense, then by the end you’re really like, ‘Oh, my God, poor Terry’. What was thrilling to me was that this isn’t just a kind of reactive, ‘Yeah, we’re unlikable!’ There is a lot of that work already—and we’ve probably maxed out on that work culturally—but I think this complicates it further.”
By James Kleinmann
Stress Positions opens in New York at IFC Center on Friday, February 19th, followed by Los Angeles and other select cities in the US from NEON on Friday, April 26th.
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