How John Early and Theda Hammel Found Laughs in Lockdowns in the Pandemic-Set ‘Stress Positions’
variety.comBrent Lang Executive Editor Not much is funny about those terrifying early days of COVID, when the world was cloaked in an apocalyptic doom and the president was telling us to drink bleach.
But in “Stress Positions,” Theda Hammel miraculously finds the funny side of lockdown, mining the masks, Purell and social distancing that defined that unhappy era for physical comedy. “Those gestures are like balloons, and they’re filled with the sense of danger and a sense of peril,” Hammel says of the Sundance-bound film that she directed and co-wrote. “And as soon as the urgency drains away, these behaviors seem ridiculous.” “Stress Positions,” which follows a 30-something gay man named Terry (John Early) who is trying — and largely failing — to look after his injured Moroccan nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash) when the pandemic hits, also wants to use the all-too-recent past to skewer millennial mores.
In Early, her friend and frequent collaborator, Hammel found the perfect muse. After all, Early’s stand-up sends up the gulf between confidence and competence that Gen Y can exhibit. “We absorbed these values in our liberal arts settings, but we’re mostly interested in kind of looking like we know what we’re talking about,” Early says. “We’re vamping.
You’ll hear a millennial guest on an NPR show, and there’s just this certain kind of cadence and it’s all about filling time.
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