Theda Hammel and John Early on Their Chaotic Pandemic Comedy Stress Positions

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Stress Positions is overflowing. Theda Hammel’s feature directorial debut packs a dizzying array of insufferable bourgeois millennials, a Theragun muscle massager shared among characters à la Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and a pulse-accelerating score into its 95-minute runtime. The characters deliver dialogue at a speed we’re only used to seeing on stage, and it’s common that a Bluetooth virtual assistant offers unwelcome interjections. Some of the most meaningful musings happen offscreen in meditative voiceover. In short, it’s a wild, almost feverish trip.

Ostensibly centered on Terry Goon (John Early), a stressed Brooklynite whose husband has recently left him for a model, the film adds layers of complication in the form of his sister’s son Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a Moroccan model with a broken leg who is currently staying with him, and his trans best friend Karla (Hammel herself) whose own girlfriend Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) wrote a popular novel based on her life. And then there’s all the Lysol.

Stress Positions is set in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, but unlike other pandemic period pieces, Hammel achieves the near-impossible feat of successfully establishing time and place without relying on news broadcasts or phrases of the week. Terry is still wiping down delivery containers in the dilapidated brownstone — once known as “the party house” — that is still owned by his ex. Meanwhile, Karla is leading the pack of mutuals eager for a meet-and-greet with Terry’s hot houseguest.

Karla’s queer philosophies in particular infuse the film; Fire Island is “a beach retreat for the children of Sodom,” she opines, telling Terry that being a trans woman is the only way out of gay “hell.” Most of Hammel’s characters are comfortable embracing a moment in which othering became sanctioned in the name of public health, as they’re able to live out their most narrowing impulses under the guise of safety. But in little glimpses amid the satire, Hammel offers us rich moments of a more earnest desire for queer expression. When her characters resist holding the world at arm’s length, we’re reminded of who we can become if we’re brave enough to look.

Ahead of Stress Position’s release, Hammel and Early spoke with Them about lying, the joys of rehearsal, and wigs.

First and foremost, I really do just want to know: has Theragun reached out?

Theda Hammel: [laughs] As far as I can tell, no. I don’t know if they’re aware. We have a beautiful, fair use opinion.

I love the line “fiction is freedom.” It felt very Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

T.H.: I think the line is used in both an idealist and an ironic way. Certainly in our fictions that we are telling each other these days, I feel like we are not embracing the potential for freedom in our imaginations. I also feel that the line is a little utopian. Karla says it in an elevated way. She goes, “Just lie. Fiction is freedom.” Karla is a character who really embraces the lie as a strategy to get through life. In the case of Bahlul, the character is actually trying to figure out what freedom might mean.

I think in any trans person’s development you can talk about it in two ways: I am this and have always known this, which is not my way in. My way in was from the outside first, then inside, which is a little bit like adorning yourself in the costume of a fiction. For me, it was drag in my twenties and then drag gave way to transness. When you’re dressing yourself in a gendered way, you’re playing with fiction and you’re finding freedom through it — and then that fiction does penetrate eventually and one day, you wake up, look around, and go, “Yeah, I am a woman now.”

John Early: I also think there is a cultural paralysis that Theda is writing about in the time that the movie is set, where I think it kind of became dangerous, for some reason, to imagine the interior lives of people who are different from you.

T.H.: Your imagination is suspect.

J.E.: Yes. I think Vanessa most embodies that. I think Terry embodies that a little bit, too. But I think Karla, whether these ideals are utopian or idealistic or ironic or not, is the one who is actually able to connect with Bahlul. There is an actual warmth, an actual transaction. There is connection and empathy and compassion and it’s because she’s not fixated on remaining separate.

Queerness might represent some sort of liberation, but it isn’t absolution. Your characters really embody that in their imperfections. How did you conceive of the narration overlaying some parts of the film? You can’t always tell who is talking.

T.H.: The most important thing about the voiceover narration is that there are two speakers, and they’re not announced. Somebody just starts talking and then they hand it off to another person. This is something that would go completely unremarked upon in a play. It was a bit controversial trying to get that approved and trying to get the movie finished. But the case that I was always making for it is that this calls attention to the fact of this movie as a fiction. The fact that you have narration means that you’re not just looking through a window into reality, you’re seeing that a fiction has been written and that there are multiple fictions.

This is a fairly low-budget film and I’m not a very experienced filmmaker, so narration gives me the chance to go elsewhere in the mind’s eye and take the story outside of the confines of this house — this trap — and imagine something happening elsewhere.

The dialogue absolutely felt play-like. John, I’ve read this resulted in a lot of rehearsal. What was that process like?

J.E.: The most exciting thing to me about the script was the idea of doing long dialogue scenes that would require a level of rehearsal. I’ve unfortunately come of age in a time in the industry when that is not valued at all. There’s a kind of resigned, sloppy quality to most television and filmmaking where you just get two cameras and you improvise, especially in comedy stuff where I’m an unpaid writer on everything I’m in. It was so thrilling to not improvise. It was really one of the great pleasures of my life. I think the performances are as good as they are because Theda’s writing required intense memorization, especially in that centerpiece birthday scene.

Theda and I both come from very earnest theater backgrounds, and we spent a lot of time reacting against or being in denial of that. It was beautiful to proudly come back to that, to embrace the ideals of theater that really don’t exist in filmmaking anymore. It was also beautiful to work with Qaher on those scenes because he’s a model and hasn’t done much acting. Those rehearsals of long dialogue scenes are where we established a trust, and he could be very vulnerable with us. I think that’s why that character is infused with a real tenderness.

T.H.: I can’t sing Qaher’s praises highly enough. He’s a very brilliant and sensitive young person and he really made this role work. He got the character to come alive. The progression throughout the shoot was really incredible to see because he’s very shy, almost like the character himself. At first, very deferential and by the end of the shoot, he was a prince. There’s a moment when he issues a command toward the end of the movie, and you feel like, “Oh my God, I’ll do whatever you say.”

A lot of the synopses of the film say something along the lines of, “this follows John Early’s character…” but actually, you could watch the entire film from a different person’s POV every time you watch it, and they become the main character. To that end, I would love to close with a question about the character Coco, who seems to show up to each scene in a different wigs. She represents a voyeurism that doesn’t feel quite sinister. Theda, what your goal was Coco?

T.H.: I’ll try and avoid talking explicitly about the sort of twist components. The movie is trying to write in and against the headwind of self-consciousness borne out of social justice and online identity politics where you’re made very aware of the limits of your own imagination, of the risks you’re running by characterizing or dramatizing otherness. You become aware of your own gaze and how it’s acting on the fiction that you’re creating.

From lesbian crime capers to Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn, the year promises plenty of queer delights.

In a sort of metafictional way – not to sound too pretentious about it – Coco is a kind of proxy filmmaker. She sits above it all. As a filmmaker, as much as people volunteer to be in your movie and pour their heart into it, you’re always taking more than they are consenting to give. You’re taking every single thing from them forever to go manipulate in the privacy of your own room. You can be as benign and loving as you want, and you can say, “I love you, I’m filming you because I love you and I’m curious about you and I want the best for you,” but you’re still taking something.

That element of voyeurism is maybe a little pornographic, maybe a little fetishistic, maybe a little bit romantic, and all of those things manifest in Coco to a much greater degree than they do in any of the other characters because she has genuine love in her heart for this young person.

I hate to be so internet culture-y but I was thinking throughout the film, “Coco is mother.”

J.E.: [laughs] I will allow that use of mother.

T.H.: One of the lines that I kept saying is that “mother is everywhere.”

J.E.: Big Mother!

Stress Positions is in theaters April 19.

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Originally Appeared on them.