Theda Hammel’s Highway to a Directorial Debut With ‘Stress Positions’

Theda Hammel is beneath no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.

“I don’t assume it’s going to attract individuals in, the concept of dwelling on that point,” she stated final week on the Soho Grand Lodge in Manhattan, sipping an natural tea on a leather-based sofa. “However I believe it has worth as a bit of little bit of a time capsule.”

Later this month, her debut movie, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that confirmed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many individuals would somewhat neglect.

And what concerning the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie factor? Was that some type of canny technique?

No, only a perform of circumstance.

“I don’t know any straight individuals,” Ms. Hammel, 36, stated. “I don’t know any.”

The movie is essentially set throughout the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, the place an anxious 30-something, performed by the comic John Early, tries to maintain his probably virus-carrying pals at bay as they clamor to satisfy his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan mannequin he began caring for simply because the world shut down.

Masks dangle from chins, however the phrase “Covid” is uttered solely as soon as. That’s as a result of Ms. Hammel is much less concerned about life throughout the pandemic than the way in which a sure set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her film is privilege: the way in which it coddles, insulates, divides.

In Selection, the critic Murtada Elfadl stated “Stress Positions” — which is backed by Neon, the unbiased movie and distribution firm that had a hand in “Eileen” and “Anatomy of a Fall” — could also be “the primary genuinely gratifying movie made concerning the pandemic.” Out journal known as it “the primary nice comedy concerning the Covid period.”

It may need fallen flat have been it not for Ms. Hammel’s attribute humor, honed over years on the cult-favorite podcast “Nymphowars” and within the alt-comedy micro-scenes that embrace her pals and collaborators Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant.

Ms. Novak and Ms. Berlant have credited her with serving to get their wellness podcast “Poog” off the bottom. Ms. Hammel would linger in a video chat as they have been recording. “Her presence there did make the present so sturdy,” Ms. Berlant stated. “We needed to impress and intrigue Theda.”

Ms. Hammel has had previous lives as a drag queen and musician, and it wasn’t all the time clear that her diversified résumé would come with movie director.

“On set, you’re feeling like everyone is you, everyone desires one thing from you,” she stated. “And also you go: ‘Excuse me, I’m not alleged to be right here! I’m alleged to be in my room doing nothing!’”

‘Don’t Be Boring. Don’t Be Boring.’

Not lengthy earlier than her personal pandemic expertise, Ms. Hammel was on the house of a buddy and mentor, the novelist Torrey Peters. Of their talks, they mentioned how dangerously straightforward it’s to burn up years of your life in Brooklyn.

“You write some humorous tweets, and also you go to some readings, and also you get recognized a bit of bit — however you’re additionally form of spinning your wheels,” Ms. Peters stated in an interview. Fairly quickly, she continued, you end up in your 30s, questioning why all you’ve acquired to indicate for your self is “a listing of your finest tweets.”

Ms. Peters was a fan of Ms. Hammel’s music and an admirer of the narrative items she had began placing into follow on “Nymphowars,” which was getting off the bottom across the identical time Ms. Peters began writing the novel “Detransition, Child.”

So when Ms. Hammel broached the concept of constructing a film, Ms. Peters shortly noticed the knowledge within the concept. As a novelist, she was predisposed to help any suggestion of disappearing for some time to create one thing massive and bold. However extra essential, she is aware of how essential it’s for a would-be artist to focus.

By the point she was in her 30s, Ms. Hammel had a very good deal extra to her identify than a group of fireside tweets. However her mentor had some extent: Her accomplishments up till that time had been decidedly scattershot.

When Ms. Hammel moved to New York Metropolis in 2010 as a current Sarah Lawrence graduate, she struggled to attach with the town’s homosexual scene, and social gathering after social gathering listed in Gayletter proved an outrageous disappointment.

At one social gathering, she met Geraldine Visco, a longtime administrator at Columbia College and longer-time fixture of New York nightlife.

On the time, Ms. Hammel was telling folks that she needed to do music. That turned out to be all of the invitation Ms. Visco wanted. Inside every week, the administrator was in Ms. Hammel’s residence and speaking right into a mic for a stable hour, which Ms. Hammel made right into a form of novelty music.

“Then I used to be a part of the Gerry Visco world,” Ms. Hammel stated.

In sensible phrases, that meant largely two issues: a do-nothing, eye-roll of a job in Columbia’s classics division by day, adopted by evenings spent within the firm of Ms. Visco’s coterie of “vagabond gays of varied ages and appearances,” a bunch that included the author and performer Joseph Keckler in addition to the mannequin and actress Hari Nef.

Nevertheless it wasn’t till she adopted the drag persona Hamm Samwich, and commenced performing high-concept (if deeply juvenile) drag numbers in dingy Brooklyn venues that Ms. Hammel discovered learn how to command an viewers.

Having her act “weirdly succeed” was “the one expertise I’d ever had of homosexual individuals listening to my language, mainly — to my concepts,” she stated in an episode of “Nymphowars.” The expertise additionally made her emotions about her gender “completely plain.”

“I simply had a really darkish evening the place I used to be like, I can’t do that anymore,” she stated.

It wasn’t lengthy earlier than Ms. Hammel started her transition, impressed partly by different pals in nightlife who have been, as she put it, taking the plunge.

Her drive to entertain didn’t fade. In 2018, she began “Nymphowars” with Macy Rodman. Its identify and its discursive rambling evoke “Infowars” and “The Joe Rogan Expertise” whereas not being something like both.

Initially a discussion board for unhinged radio performs, gonzo area recordings and rants about “A Star Is Born” when it debuted that yr, the podcast has since settled into an prolonged bit primarily based on the premise that it’s an ad-supported terrestrial radio present — name signal KNFW — that broadcasts from the WHYY studio in Philadelphia. A fictionalized Terry Gross is a recurring presence on the present.

To the unamused, the present could also be bewildering and crass; to followers, it is vitally presumably the funniest factor ever recorded.

“I’ll do something for the present to be humorous,” Ms. Hammel stated. “I’m not saying that’s good or unhealthy or noble or magic, or that’s the supply of true energy,” she added. “That’s actually simply my solely precedence when doing that present: Don’t be boring. Don’t be boring. Simply don’t be boring — in any respect prices.”

Confronting Privilege

Ms. Hammel, who has jokingly described herself as a dilettante at instances, is conscious of how comparatively straightforward it has been for her to slide into totally different artistic niches.

She grew up in Portland, Ore., the oldest of three kids of a heart specialist and a onetime Pilates teacher. She and her siblings attended personal college alongside the kids of the ultrawealthy. Ms. Hammel recollects her confusion in elementary college, when she couldn’t perceive why her household didn’t have a helicopter like one in every of her classmates.

She credit her personal privilege, too, in terms of one in every of her most formative experiences: discovering a cancerous lump when she was 22 whereas doing vocal warm-ups at school. Her most cancers had a promising remedy protocol, and her doctor father was in a position to name in a second opinion that spared her the harshness of radiation remedy.

Ms. Hammel stated she generally wonders if she can be a “stronger, higher individual” with out her safe upbringing. “I really feel, as it’s, like a type of weak, pampered individual,” she stated, “and I don’t know learn how to keep away from giving an account of that.”

Ms. Peters has noticed firsthand Ms. Hammel’s impulse to reveal her benefits. “Detransition, Child” incorporates a character primarily based on Ms. Hammel, a since-transitioned drag performer named Thalia who delights in regaling audiences with tales of her mother and father, “good, long-suffering individuals” who help her at 29 “as a result of she is a spoiled brat who has by no means had a job.”

In actual life, nevertheless, Ms. Peters stated she didn’t consider that Ms. Hammel’s background occluded her skill to see the world clearly.

“I actually assume that when individuals have privilege, they’ve alternatives to make stuff,” Ms. Peters stated. “However I additionally assume that privilege doesn’t clarify the issues that they make. Like, you already know, Tolstoy had an property with serfs, proper? And there have been many different landowners who didn’t write ‘Anna Karenina.’”

Skewering Bourgeois Millennials

In “Stress Positions,” the characters’ privileges manifest as comedic obliviousness. In a flashback scene, a white vacationer seeking “an genuine expertise” loses it after being proven to a museum, mercilessly badgering a neighborhood to take her someplace “with none vacationers.” And of their dealings with Bahlul, the younger Moroccan mannequin performed by Qaher Harhash, not one of the Brooklynites appear to know the place — and even what — Morocco is.

Along with writing and directing the movie, Ms. Hammel performs Karla, a trans lady who’s simply as more likely to pilfer a bottle of vodka as she is to roll out a yoga mat. After Bahlul provides her an exasperated primer on the Center East and North Africa, he’s handled to a lecture by Karla on what Ms. Hammel later described as “the hell of being a homosexual man in a world of homosexual guys.”

In a one-minute monologue, Karla laces into the vacancy of sure transactional homosexual relationships, her perspective that of a weary veteran of 1 too many conditional trysts.

“Homosexual guys know precisely what she means when she makes that speech — possibly greater than anyone else,” Ms. Hammel stated. She suspects that the viewers probably to determine with the monologue can be “the trans individuals who have left that world and the homosexual guys who’re nonetheless in it.”

Ms. Hammel identified that Karla’s speech about her flight from the world of gays is considerably ironic: Would somebody who had really stated goodbye to all that be bounding again into Terry’s enterprise so eagerly at each flip? She was additionally cautious to notice that the film “isn’t a direct porting of my factors of view into any of the characters.”

Ms. Hammel stated she has began writing once more, however she hopes her subsequent undertaking will probably be smaller in scale than “Stress Positions.”

She has no specific psychological picture of the viewers for her debut movie — “it’s very laborious to think about most people anymore,” she stated — however she has a sense it received’t be solely the identical homosexual individuals who hearken to the podcast or crowd into her stay reveals.

Homosexual guys are fantastic, she stated with a smile. “Nevertheless it’s a lot simpler to be amongst them whenever you don’t need to be one.”