Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Working through grief: Mark O’Halloran’s CONVERSATIONS AFTER SEX and Sam Morrison’s SUGAR DADDY

• By drediman
• March 13, 2023
• No Comments

Over the past weekend, I took in a pair of shows that dealt with the process of working through grief. Here are my thoughts.

CONVERSATIONS AFTER SEX
Irish Arts Center
Closed

First up is THISPOBABY’s production of Mark O’Halloran’s bluntly-named Conversations After Sex (RECOMMENDED), which finished up a limited run this past weekend at Irish Arts Center. If you haven’t already gathered from the title, the play is a chronologically ordered collection of post-coital scenes between a repeating handful of couples. Over the course of these seemingly casual encounters, it gradually becomes clear that many of the characters are using sex as a means of dealing grief or, contrastingly, distracting themselves from dealing with grief. By the end of the show, the playwright makes the claim that sometimes these loosely defined relationships are more therapeutic precisely because of they are less guarded. It’s a fascinating thesis, which O’Halloran has conjured in a parade of punchy, stealthily-written scenes. Tom Creed’s production is beautifully calibrated, and the performances by Fionn Ó Loingsigh and Kate Stanley Brennan as the various couples give raw, skillful performances that really got under my skin.

SUGAR DADDY
SoHo Playhouse
Through April 1

Then there’s Sam Morrison’s solo show Sugar Daddy (RECOMMENDED), which is currently enjoying an extended Off-Broadway run at SoHo Playhouse. In turn hilarious and heartbreaking – often times within the same joke – the autobiographical work was created as a means for Morrison to work through his grief over the loss of Jonathan, his partner of three years. Morrison has a natural gift for both comedy and storytelling, which he fully leverages to chronicle the circumstances around first meeting Jonathan in Provincetown, their relatively short but rich romantic relationship, and the difficult emotional aftermath of his passing (smartly, the piece intentionally veers away from describing his actual death). The play also touches upon other topics, namely Morrison’s preference for bears over twinks, his adventures as a New York gay, and life during the pandemic. The show’s main punchline revolves around the origins of the show’s title (no spoilers here!), and it perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the show.