As the exquisitely frazzled Terry Goon, John Early has to keep many plates spinning at once. In some cases, literally; Theda Hammel’s debut feature, Stress Positions, shows Goon rushing around a derelict Brooklyn brownstone once called the “Party House” prepping a chicken parm, his fingers caked to Frankensteinian girth with egg and bread crumbs. He’s looking after his nephew Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), a 19-year-old model with the face of a cherub, while his broken leg heals. Also in the mix for a 4th of July backyard BBQ are his intense, inscrutable, chain-smoking landlady (Rebecca F. Wright), his clout-chasing, flag-burning BFF (Hammel, a longtime friend of Early’s), her novelist girlfriend (Amy Zimmer), and eventually, Terry’s not-quite-ex-husband (John Roberts). And because it’s summer 2020, the COVID-conscious Terry does it all while obsessively sanitizing, distancing, gloving, re-gloving, and banging his pots in thanks to the nurses.
“I’ve always had this bourgeois clown that I do, that for whatever reason I’m hyper-fixated on,” Early tells Vanity Fair shortly before the world premiere of Stress Positions at Sundance. “For better or worse, I’m always putting this character in a dinner party scenario. That, or giving a toast.” He hopes Hammel’s snappy, savvy farce can change that, fully exorcizing this stock type from his repertoire: “After this, I’m not allowing myself to do that guy anymore.”
Early has often gravitated to the minefield that is having company over. In his episode of Netflix’s 2016 sketch anthology series The Characters, Early has a minor breakdown during his own wedding after learning the venue once housed slaves. Elliott, the compulsive liar he played for five seasons on TBS’s Search Party, lived his entire life as a meticulously composed act. For a 2017 New York Magazine profile, Early invited the interviewer over and whipped up a cacio e pepe at home. (The story includes a recipe that’s heavy on all-caps and interrobangs (?!). Read between the lines, and you can see his blood pressure spiking.)
For Early, the pressurized, claustrophobic Stress Positions pushes this bit to its breaking point, “putting that clown in a fully-realized world, with a history and relationships, to deconstruct him and ask why he’s this way.” Hammel wrote him the role of Terry Goon—whose name, Early says “could absolutely” be a reference to the slang term for protracted masturbation, judging by Hammel’s “cloacal” sense of humor—as the culmination of a collaboration dating back to their days at the Atlantic Theater Company. Back then, he was working the front desk and she was taking an acting course. “We were both [chuckles] alive with the technique,” Early says in a sarcastic tone, then pauses. “See, that’s the kind of thing that is going to make me sound so pretentious in print. I need them to hear the irony in my voice.”
The desire to be seen the right way weighs far heavier on Terry. Over the course of a hot summer night, the desperately woke thirtysomething comes undone while trying to keep up with the younger, queerer, and hipper. Terry’s self-destructive drive to play host speaks to his broader and deeper fixation on optics, a distinctly millennial slant on the need to project an image of goodness. “There’s been an uncanny feeling watching art in the past 10 years, where it’s didactic, a way of morally purifying yourself, proving that you’re on the right side of history,” Early says. “It’s folly to try and prove how coherent and unimpeachable your stances are, which is possible on the internet. But socially, that breaks down immediately in a way that can be quite funny.”
He explains: “It’s there in the way Israel and Palestine, for instance, can confuse people’s identity-matrix logic. There’s this feeling of, ‘Wasn’t the rule that because of this equation of my identity, I am the oppressed?’ Then here comes something that doesn’t fit snugly into that narrative, because it’s about power and militarism and not necessarily identity, and that confuses people so much. I think this movie is about that confusion. ‘Weren’t we just in the streets celebrating gay marriage?’ Terry feels like he was supposed to have more time celebrating the triumph. But the world, unfortunately, moved on.”
Early specifically admires how Hammel has picked up on the “phrases and cadences of the internet” without fully absorbing them. “She’s not an eccentric hermit,” he says. “She’s logged on. But she has a strong constitution.” Hammel jabs at her generation, illustrating how the effort to uphold progressive principles can turn us into corny, self-righteous, annoying versions of ourselves. Terry embodies a particular strain of entry-level liberalism closer to the ideological center, a #StillWithHer subscriber to “the Pete and Chasten model of gay guy.” Early confesses that he’s not totally unfamiliar with the mentality. “I look back at some of my behavior online, back in 2020, and I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes like, ‘Oh, god!’ remembering something I posted, just sweating.”
Through precise minor details marking time and place, Hammel and Early shade Terry’s aspirations for respectability and correctness. His conflicted relationship to homosexuality, for one, comes across in his porn-site preference for the jocky, white-bread Sean Cody. Before his guests arrive, he hides his sex gear—as well as Chekhov’s Theragun—in a symbolically loaded closet, and rolls a disco ball the size of a Sisyphean boulder out to the trash. While huffing and puffing, he mutters, “Everybody has a fucking septum piercing now.” Terry may frantically flit in and out of rooms like Frasier Crane, but in this resentment about aging into irrelevance, Early sees the character as something closer to “a gay, millennial Tony Soprano.”
Early’s hectic but tightly controlled style gels with a screenplay of elaborate, fine-tuned construction, closer to Molière than your average New York indie. “It’s not vibey,” he clarifies. “It’s not improvised.” The shoot was a crucible, with the entire crew crammed into a stuffy, crumbling house during a sweltering stretch of September that saw a toilet explode and send water pouring through the ceiling below. Early herniated a spinal disc; once production picked up following a brief postponement, Hammel incorporated his back problems into the character. “I can’t tell whether that was generous or sadistic of her,” he laughs.
Even as Early gains deeper insight into this fun-house-mirror alter ego, he still takes pride in the work itself. He knows that slipping on a tenderloin of raw chicken requires finesse, and he just wants to ensure that he does the gag justice. “You have a person looking you dead in the eye, explaining the safety precautions, and I’m listening,” he says. “At the end of the day, though, my body is falling through the air. No wires. This is not The Matrix. But these pratfalls were always essential to the script. It was scary for me, less in terms of hurting myself, and more about not delivering. If there’s anything I should be able to do, it’s that.”
Charles Bramesco
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