NEW YORK, NY.- Theda Hammel is under no delusion that COVID is box-office gold.
“I don’t think it’s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,” she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. “But I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.”
This month, her debut film, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that showed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many people would rather forget.
And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?
No, just a function of circumstance.
“I don’t know any straight people,” said Hammel, 36. “I don’t know any.”
The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by comedian John Early, tries to keep his potentially virus-carrying friends at bay as they clamor to meet his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan model he started caring for just as the world shut down.
Masks dangle from chins, but the word “COVID” is uttered only once. That’s because Hammel is less interested in life during the pandemic than the way a certain set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her movie is privilege: the way it coddles, insulates, divides.
In Variety, critic Murtada Elfadl said “Stress Positions” — which is backed by Neon, the independent film and distribution company that had a hand in “Eileen” and “Anatomy of a Fall” — may be “the first genuinely enjoyable film made about the pandemic.” Out magazine called it “the first great comedy about the COVID era.”
It might have fallen flat were it not for Hammel’s characteristic humor, honed over years on the cult-favorite podcast “Nymphowars” and in the alt-comedy micro-scenes that include her friends and collaborators Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant.
Novak and Berlant have credited her with helping get their wellness podcast “Poog” off the ground. Hammel would linger in a video chat as they were recording. “Her presence there did make the show so strong,” Berlant said. “We wanted to impress and intrigue Theda.”
Hammel has had past lives as a drag queen and a musician, and it wasn’t always clear that her varied resume would include film director.
“On set, you feel like everybody is looking at you, everybody wants something from you,” she said. “And you go: ‘Excuse me, I’m not supposed to be here! I’m supposed to be in my room doing nothing!’”
‘Don’t Be Boring’
Not long before her own pandemic experience, Hammel was at the home of a friend and mentor, novelist Torrey Peters. In their talks, they discussed how dangerously easy it is to fritter away years of your life in Brooklyn.
“You write some funny tweets, and you go to some readings, and you get known a little bit — but you’re also kind of spinning your wheels,” Peters said. Pretty soon, she continued, you find yourself in your 30s, wondering why all you’ve got to show for yourself is “a list of your best tweets.”
Peters was a fan of Hammel’s music and an admirer of the narrative gifts she had started putting into practice on “Nymphowars,” which was getting off the ground around the same time Peters started writing the novel “Detransition, Baby.”
So when Hammel broached the idea of making a movie, Peters quickly saw the wisdom in the idea. As a novelist, she was predisposed to support any suggestion of creating something big and ambitious. But more important, she knows how important it is for a would-be artist to focus.
By the time she was in her 30s, Hammel had a good deal more to her name than a collection of fire tweets. But her mentor had a point: Her accomplishments up until that point had been decidedly scattershot.
When Hammel moved to New York City in 2010 as a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate, she struggled to connect with the city’s gay scene, and party after party listed in Gayletter proved an outrageous disappointment.
At one party, she met Geraldine Visco, a longtime administrator at Columbia University and longer-time fixture of New York nightlife.
At the time, Hammel was telling people that she wanted to do music. That turned out to be all the invitation Visco needed. Within a week, the administrator was in Hammel’s apartment and talking into a mic for a solid hour, which Hammel made into a kind of novelty song.
“Then I was part of the Gerry Visco world,” Hammel said.
In practical terms, that meant mostly two things: a do-nothing, eye-roll of a job in Columbia’s classics department by day, followed by evenings spent in the company of Visco’s coterie of “vagabond gays of various ages and appearances,” a group that included writer and performer Joseph Keckler as well as model and actress Hari Nef.
But it wasn’t until she adopted the drag persona Hamm Samwich, and began performing high-concept (if deeply juvenile) drag numbers in dingy Brooklyn venues that Hammel learned how to command an audience.
Having her act “weirdly succeed” was “the only experience I’d ever had of gay people listening to my language, basically — to my ideas,” she said in an episode of “Nymphowars.” The experience also made her feelings about her gender “totally undeniable.”
“I just had a very dark night where I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” she said.
It wasn’t long before Hammel began her transition, inspired in part by other friends in nightlife who were, as she put it, taking the plunge.
Her penchant to entertain didn’t fade. In 2018, she started “Nymphowars” with Macy Rodman. Its name and its discursive rambling evoke Infowars and “The Joe Rogan Experience” while not being anything like either.
Originally a forum for unhinged radio plays, gonzo field recordings and rants about “A Star Is Born” when it debuted that year, the podcast has since settled into an extended bit based on the premise that it is an ad-supported terrestrial radio show — call sign KNFW — that broadcasts from the WHYY studio in Philadelphia. A fictionalized Terry Gross is a recurring presence on the show, as is the specter of actress Ann Dowd, who haunts and generally harasses the women for reasons that remain unclear.
To the unamused, the show may be bewildering and crass; to fans, it is very possibly the funniest thing ever recorded.
“I will do anything for the show to be funny,” Hammel said. “I’m not saying that’s good or bad or noble or magic, or that’s the source of true power,” she added. “That is literally just my only priority when doing that show: Don’t be boring. Don’t be boring. Just don’t be boring — at all costs.”
Confronting Privilege
Hammel, who has jokingly described herself as a dilettante at times, is aware of how relatively easy it has been for her to slip into different creative niches.
She grew up in Portland, Oregon, the oldest of three children of a cardiologist and a onetime Pilates instructor. She and her siblings attended private school alongside the children of the ultrawealthy. Hammel recalls her confusion in elementary school, when she couldn’t understand why her family didn’t have a helicopter like one of her classmates.
She credits her own privilege, too, when it comes to one of her most formative experiences: discovering a cancerous lump when she was 22 while doing vocal warm-ups at college. Her cancer had a promising treatment protocol, and her physician father was able to call in a second opinion that spared her the harshness of radiation therapy.
Hammel said she sometimes wonders if she would be a “stronger, better person” without her secure upbringing. “I feel, as it is, like a sort of weak, pampered person,” she said, “and I don’t know how to avoid giving an account of that.”
Peters has observed firsthand Hammel’s impulse to disclose her advantages. “Detransition, Baby” features a character based on Hammel, a since-transitioned drag performer named Thalia who delights in regaling audiences with stories of her parents, “good, long-suffering people” who support her at 29 “because she is a spoiled brat who has never had a job.”
In real life, however, Peters said she didn’t believe that Hammel’s background occluded her ability to see the world clearly.
“I certainly think that when people have privilege, they have opportunities to make stuff,” Peters said. “But I also think that privilege doesn’t explain the things that they make. Like, you know, Tolstoy had an estate with serfs, right? And there were many other landowners who did not write ‘Anna Karenina.’”
Skewering Bourgeois Millennials
In “Stress Positions,” the characters’ privileges manifest as comedic obliviousness. In a flashback scene, a white tourist in search of “an authentic experience” loses it after being shown to a museum, mercilessly badgering a local to take her somewhere “without any tourists.” And in their dealings with Bahlul, the young Moroccan model played by Qaher Harhash, none of the Brooklynites seem to know where — or even what — Morocco is.
In addition to writing and directing the film, Hammel plays Karla, a trans woman who is just as likely to pilfer a bottle of vodka as she is to roll out a yoga mat. After Bahlul gives her an exasperated primer on the Middle East and North Africa, he is treated to a lecture by Karla on what Hammel later described as “the hell of being a gay guy in a world of gay guys.”
In a monologue, Karla laces into the emptiness of certain transactional gay relationships, her perspective that of a weary veteran of one too many conditional trysts.
“Gay guys know exactly what she means when she makes that speech — maybe more than anybody else,” Hammel said. She suspects that the viewers most likely to identify with the monologue would be “the trans people who have left that world and the gay guys who are still in it.”
Hammel pointed out that Karla’s speech about her flight from the world of gays is somewhat ironic: Would someone who had said goodbye to all that be bounding back into Terry’s business so eagerly at every turn? She was also careful to note that the movie “is not a direct porting of my points of view into any of the characters.”
Hammel said she has started writing again, but she hopes her next project will be smaller in scale than “Stress Positions.”
She has no particular mental image of her debut film’s audience — “it’s very hard to imagine the general public anymore,” she said — but she has a feeling it won’t be only the same gay people who listen to the podcast or crowd into her live shows.
Gay guys are wonderful, she said with a smile. “But it’s much easier to be among them when you don’t have to be one.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
