\n<\/p>\n
Theda Hammel is under no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,\u201d she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. \u201cBut I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later this month, her debut film, \u201cStress Positions,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?<\/p>\n
No, just a function of circumstance.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know any straight people,\u201d Ms. Hammel, 36, said. \u201cI don\u2019t know any.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by the 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.<\/p>\n
Masks dangle from chins, but the word \u201cCovid\u201d is uttered only once. That\u2019s because Ms. 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.<\/p>\n
In Variety,<\/a> the critic Murtada Elfadl said \u201cStress Positions\u201d \u2014 which is backed by Neon, the independent film and distribution company that had a hand in \u201cEileen\u201d and \u201cAnatomy of a Fall\u201d \u2014 may be \u201cthe first genuinely enjoyable film made about the pandemic.\u201d Out magazine<\/a> called it \u201cthe first great comedy about the Covid era.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It might have fallen flat were it not for Ms. Hammel\u2019s characteristic humor, honed over years on the cult-favorite podcast \u201cNymphowars\u201d and in the alt-comedy micro-scenes that include her friends and collaborators Jacqueline Novak and Kate Berlant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Novak and Ms. Berlant have credited her with helping get their wellness podcast \u201cPoog\u201d<\/a> off the ground. Ms. Hammel would linger in a video chat as they were recording. \u201cHer presence there did make the show so strong,\u201d Ms. Berlant said. \u201cWe wanted to impress and intrigue Theda.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Hammel has had past lives as a drag queen and musician, and it wasn\u2019t always clear that her varied r\u00e9sum\u00e9 would include film director.<\/p>\n \u201cOn set, you feel like everybody is looking at you, everybody wants something from you,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd you go: \u2018Excuse me, I\u2019m not supposed to be here! I\u2019m supposed to be in my room doing nothing!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Not long before her own pandemic experience, Ms. Hammel was at the home of a friend and mentor, the novelist Torrey Peters. In their talks, they discussed how dangerously easy it is to fritter away years of your life in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n \u201cYou write some funny tweets, and you go to some readings, and you get known a little bit \u2014 but you\u2019re also kind of spinning your wheels,\u201d Ms. Peters said in an interview. Pretty soon, she continued, you find yourself in your 30s, wondering why all you\u2019ve got to show for yourself is \u201ca list of your best tweets.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Peters was a fan of Ms. Hammel\u2019s music and an admirer of the narrative gifts she had started putting into practice on \u201cNymphowars,\u201d which was getting off the ground around the same time Ms. Peters started writing the novel \u201cDetransition, Baby<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n So when Ms. Hammel broached the idea of making a movie, Ms. Peters quickly saw the wisdom in the idea. As a novelist, she was predisposed to support any suggestion of disappearing for a while to create something big and ambitious. But more important, she knows how important it is for a would-be artist to focus.<\/p>\n By the time she was in her 30s, Ms. 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.<\/p>\n When Ms. Hammel moved to New York City in 2010 as a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate, she struggled to connect with the city\u2019s gay scene, and party after party listed in Gayletter proved an outrageous disappointment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n At one party, she met Geraldine Visco<\/a>, a longtime administrator at Columbia University and longer-time fixture of New York nightlife.<\/p>\n At the time, Ms. Hammel was telling people that she wanted to do music. That turned out to be all the invitation Ms. Visco needed. Within a week, the administrator was in Ms. Hammel\u2019s apartment and talking into a mic for a solid hour, which Ms. Hammel made into a kind of novelty song.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThen I was part of the Gerry Visco world,\u201d Ms. Hammel said.<\/p>\n In practical terms, that meant mostly two things: a do-nothing, eye-roll of a job in Columbia\u2019s classics department by day, followed by evenings spent in the company of Ms. Visco\u2019s coterie of \u201cvagabond gays of various ages and appearances,\u201d a group that included the writer and performer Joseph Keckler<\/a> as well as the model and actress Hari Nef<\/a>.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t until she adopted the drag persona Hamm Samwich, and began performing high-concept (if deeply juvenile) drag numbers in dingy Brooklyn venues that Ms. Hammel learned how to command an audience.<\/p>\n Having her act \u201cweirdly succeed\u201d was \u201cthe only experience I\u2019d ever had of gay people listening to my language, basically \u2014 to my ideas,\u201d she said in an episode of \u201cNymphowars.\u201d The experience also made her feelings about her gender \u201ctotally undeniable.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI just had a very dark night where I was like, I can\u2019t do this anymore,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t long before Ms. Hammel began her transition, inspired in part by other friends in nightlife who were, as she put it, taking the plunge.<\/p>\n\u2018Don\u2019t Be Boring. Don\u2019t Be Boring.\u2019<\/h2>\n