Under COVID, Queer Chaos Reigns in Stress Positions
Stress Positions, Theda Hammel’s ambitious directorial debut, is a divisive dramedy that follows a trio of white, queer, Brooklyn-dwelling millennials as they navigate identity amidst the height of the pandemic. Going against the grain of a cultural landscape desperate to pretend like the COVID-19 pandemic never happened, Hammel dives headfirst into her exploration of the specific ways the universal experience of lockdown drove us all insane.
Brooklyn, Spring of 2020: The sirens are constantly wailing, and Terry (John Early) is hellbent on maintaining a rigid quarantine. However, it quickly becomes clear that his stringent masking, incessant Lysol spraying, obnoxious pot banging and other quarantine-specific behaviors are mechanisms for coping with the sudden collapse of his marriage to his former boss Leo (John Roberts, who you may know as the voice of Bob’s Burgers’ Linda Belcher), who has unceremoniously already moved on to hotter, younger tail in Berlin.
Terry’s best friend Karla (Hammel), a trans woman who loudly reminds everyone of her Greek heritage at every turn, also finds herself in a failing relationship. Karla ensures that she won’t see or hear her relationship’s failures with “borrowed” alcohol and the sound of her own voice. Karla’s girlfriend Vanessa (Amy Zimmer), a vegan “Larchmont Jew,” built her budding literary career on a novel largely inspired by Karla’s transition, sans permission. Karla and Vanessa live together in a Greenpoint apartment paid for by the book, while Terry is holed up in one of his soon to be ex-husband’s properties, dubbed the “party house.”
Although he is newly single, Terry is not alone in the party house. He has taken in his 19-year-old nephew Bahlul (IRL fashion model and exciting newcomer Qaher Harhash), a male model with a broken leg. At first he relies on Terry, but as Bahlul recovers, Terry’s mommying grows more and more suffocating to a teen with great cheekbones and long eyelashes on the brink of self-discovery in a new city. Bahlul finds friendship in Terry’s older, idiosyncratic upstairs neighbor Coco (Rebecca F. Wright), who is more a benevolent apparition overseeing the theatrics than she is an active participant—except to share her Marlboro Reds with Bahlul.
Terry, Karla and Vanessa are all so hyper-focused on their identities—as Greek, as gay, as a writer, as “good”—and painfully stagnant in their lives, that they are somehow unable to take a minute to pull their heads out of their asses, to move out of their semi-self-inflicted stress positions. These circumstances are of course exacerbated by the COVID lockdown, but I have a sneaking suspicion that they would all still be the kind of people who publicly pose as international relations experts, but privately watch YouTube explainers on “the Middle East.”
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