Yesterday, Trove opened Ian Reid’s play Heaven is a place in the sky at the Tank, running Sept 3-8th. I was involved in an early workshop of the piece and invited to share some thoughts on Reid’s penetrating, deeply funny script. You’ll find my reflections below; I hope you’ll go to the show. I’m told there were 100 burgers at the opening night party.
The language of Heaven is obsessed with debt, labour, and economy: Everyone is working. Everyone is buying. Everyone’s emotions are contextualized by words like “credit”, “greed”, and “owe.” These words appropriately populate a world in which all interpersonal interaction is defined by wealth and labor: Juliet makes more than her boyfriend Geoff, but she doesn’t have time to fix his loneliness - so she hires two actors to be his friends. The wealthier actor begins to feel dubious about the conceit while the one most in need of the money cannot afford to waffle. Whitney, Juliet’s best friend, is caught in a sort-of self-denial: She works at a non-profit but she wants nice things. She loves Juliet, who is in a relationship. And an eccentric therapist oversees the young people, extremely concerned that she doesn’t have any friends outside of her clients.
Although Heaven is a place in the sky unfurls in the summer of 2024, it articulates a contemporary figurative landscape that feels far more dystopic. It is a (hilarious) play about the emotional impotence wrought by late-stage capitalism - a world full of people who continue (despite their genuine and best efforts) to miss and miss and miss each other under the large shadow of the dollar.
Make no mistake, Heaven is a place in the sky is a dry, winking farce. (As the title ought to suggest. I mean…where else would Heaven be?) It just so happens to feature hugely funny events which transpire on the scorched earth of the New York labor-market. (A market surely familiar to most of the artists involved in the project - all darlings of the downtown, DIY theater scene in New York.) Trove has begun to establish itself for this sort of erudite, droll humor. (Reid’s last project with the group, of which he is the artistic director, was “The Last Annual Spelling Bee” which was just genuinely a spelling bee with no further commentary.) Heaven sees this tradition continued with a play that on paper is a hilarious slamming-doors farce (woman hires actors to be friends with her boyfriend) but which, in reality, accumulates to something more contemplative, urgent, and full of feeling.
I found myself moved by Heaven, particularly by the other (linguistic and literal) thread coursing through the play - the constant, ferocious reaching towards the secular divinity of human connection. Despite its seeming impossibility in the world (early on Juliet describes a dream in which Jeff Bezos is preparing to pay God off for all of mankind’s sins) the people in the play are human and wanting and (perhaps most importantly) trying. Geoff is trying to find real masculine communion with actors Rosenberg and McCoy. The actors trying to find the same amongst themselves. Juliet and Whitney, despite the unmovable difference of unreciprocated love, attempt to find a way forward in their relationship. In the impotent emotional landscape of 2024 New York, everyone is looking upwards towards heaven and (can I even use this word?) sincerely hoping. I think that’s sort-of beautiful, no?
Heaven is a place in the sky runs at The Tank through September 8th. It is written by Ian Reid and directed by Jake Beckhard. It features Chris Erdman, Lillith Fallon, Sterling Gates, Ruchir Khazanchi, Erin Noll, and Kayla Zanakis. Production design by Mollie Leckrone, lighting design by Jacqueline Scaletta, stage management by Ainsley Grace, and produced by Emma Richmond.