Purchase tickets to Ian Reid’s Heaven is a Place in the Sky, running September 3-8 at The Tank!
Friends premiered almost 30 years ago exactly, on September 22nd, 1994. Its omnipresence is well-documented. My boyfriend’s parents used to live within walking distance of The FRIENDS Experience, the tourist trap that seems to consist entirely of a replica of the show’s Central Perk Café, complete with a recognizable orange couch, for, I presume, posing with one’s own friends.
Friends, along with other popular modern NYC texts like You’ve Got Mail and the post-high school seasons of Glee, contributed greatly to childhood psychic dreamscapes of myself thriving in the Big Apple with a robust group of witty and good-looking peers, pursuing my dreams of working as a high-powered exec at Ralph Lauren/running my independent bookstore/studying musical theater at NYADA.
I thought about Friends while reading Heaven is a place in the sky, a funny and melancholy farce by Ian Reid (who happens to be my friend!), running at The Tank September 3rd-8th in a production directed by Jake Beckhard and produced by theatre and live arts collective Trove. Like an episode of Friends, Reid’s play involves a series of hijinks, blunders, and misunderstandings between six young people living in present-day New York City. But while in the TV show, the who’s-with-who relationship dynamics usually further solidify and enmesh the titular friends, in Heaven, efforts to increase intimacy usually fail (for the record: Ian Reid, unlike me, did not grow up watching Friends. He claims to have never seen a full episode. Should I lure him into watching by taking him to The FRIENDS Experience?).
At the beginning of the play, Juliet, a twentysomething who makes “a lot” of money working at a big financial institution uses said money to hire McCoy and Rosenberg, two actors (“Would I have seen you in anything?” someone asks. “Do you see a lot of self-produced downtown theater?” Rosenberg responds) to befriend her lonely boyfriend Geoff. Hilarity ensues, and Heaven is very, very funny, line after line. Reid is a great chronicler of the cadence and outlooks of twentysomethings living in New York right now. “Last June, I read this book by Simon Critchley about Athens that impressed just how much the Greek tragedies were super specific to this one city and group of people going through this one super specific political and cultural moment, which was very exciting to me, and made me want to try to write something in a similar vein,” Reid said. Conversation in Heaven involves spotted lanternflies and the dearth of public bathrooms in Manhattan, but the play is not reliant on slang or current headlines. “There were things I didn’t want to reference so as not to pin down the play too much in time,” he explained. “I worried these would break the audience out of the world more than let them see it as their own. I didn’t want to be seen winking at them, basically.”
The play’s contemporaneity never feels cheap, both because of the precision of Reid’s observational, humanistic writing, as well as the play’s gently uncanny quality. Heaven sits beside realism, without fully embodying that mode. Instead, Reid offers a slightly askew (and, in one hilarious and surprising conversation near the end, highly askew) version of present New York City. The characters in Heaven are curious about their lives (half of them are in therapy, all seeing the same therapist), and are constantly trying to “parse out what the emotional tone of the city is,” Reid said. “What is the thing that makes everyone so goddamn obsessed with it?”
Part of what attracted me to the alternate-reality New York City that Friends was selling was its packaged coziness—I think this is also where the success of a gimmick like The FRIENDS Experience lies. There are multiple spheres of comfort in the world of Friends; material (Monica’s lavish, impossibly big apartment), narrative (episodes follow a familiar, identifiable pattern), financial (characters “struggle” in a cute way), social (the friends always have each other, which means that they always have a place to go—the orange couch is waiting for them). The friends are rarely seen alone.
In Heaven, the characters do not possess this same protection against aloneness. Juliet self-defensively tells her therapist that, unlike Geoff, she has “so many” friends. “Friends from yoga, friends from pilates, friends from parties, friends from old friends,” she insists. But the only friend she ever talks about is Whitney, who has been falling in and out of love (but mostly in) with Juliet since college. Whitney happens to see the same therapist as Juliet, and this ethically-anarchic therapist happens to be going through a divorce, and in search of friends herself. All the characters in Heaven are almost connecting, almost pairing off. Geoff is excited about the prospect of forming a friend group with Rosenberg and McCoy—until he learns that Juliet has paid them for their company.
“The way I think of a friend group has maybe changed from a group in which everyone has equal, equivalent relations with each other member…to some kind of misshapen, loose confederation of asymmetrical relationships,” Reid told me. In Heaven, the six lonely people are never all in the same place at the same time. The friend group never exists.
Reid said that he has experienced “the more storybook version” of a friend group (see: Friends) at different times in his life, but that “it’s always been born out of temporary circumstances.” His phrasing reminded me of Weike Wang’s recent essay about friendship in the New Yorker, in which, after musing about the many negatives involved in being a friend, she resolves that “though most friendships are temporary, they are very beautiful in bloom.” Maybe, like plants, friendships are seasonal, with natural life cycles of growth and decay? This seems to me a very soothing and peaceful way to look at friendships, perhaps even an aspirational way to relate to other people! Although personally, I’ve always been more of a clinger-on, afraid of change. In Heaven, Juliet balks when Whitney tries to break things off in their lopsided, romantically-unrequited friendship:
WHITNEY
I think I shouldn’t see you. Again. For a while.
JULIET
Okay. How long do you think…?
WHITNEY
Like, for a while.
JULIET
Okay.
Do you know when…?
I identify with Juliet’s unwillingness, with her hope that by asking one more question, by probing a little harder, her circumstances might shift back to how she’d like them to be. In the same scene, Whitney despairs over the first cold day that marks the end of summer: “I just want it to be warm. It’s only September.” Reality intrudes upon our ideal.
Ian told me that while writing the play he was “thinking a lot about this religious idea [from Blaise Pascal] that everyone in the world has a God-shaped hole inside of them.” He went on: I wouldn’t say I believe in God, but I increasingly believe in a God-shaped hole, and I think a lot of the characters are trying to understand and treat that hole in some way.” Aside from the title, and one anecdote in the first scene, there are no explicit references to God or heaven in the play. Instead, the characters experience what Reid calls a “quasi-spiritual yearning” and the play itself is marked with subtle, “not-quite-realized” moments that gesture toward Something More than our material world–which its compromises and debts and dissatisfaction and loneliness.
“I don’t think people are made to be alone,” Juliet says in Heaven, “I don’t think that’s, like, what a person is.”
As a lonely teenager, I used to watch Friends (my family owned boxsets of all ten seasons) in my basement or living room for hours on end, falling asleep in front of the TV. I used to love falling asleep in front of the TV; actually, it used to be the only way I could fall asleep. It was only when I started college and began living with a roommate that I was able to quit my habit, finally falling asleep without the chatter of fictional friends with fictional problems. The silence no longer felt threatening, or permanent, because someone was beside me. The companionship had, temporarily, healed my personal spiritual wound.
Heaven is a place in the sky
by Ian Reid
directed by Jake Beckhard
September 3-6, 7 PM September 7 & 8, 3 PM
Featuring: Chris Erdman, Lillith Fallon, Sterling Gates*, Ruchir Khazanchi, Erin Noll, and Kayla Zanakis*
*Equity Member appearing with permission of Actors’ Equity Association without benefit of an Equity contract in this Off-Off Broadway production.
Production design by Mollie Leckrone
Lighting design by Jacqueline Scaletta
Stage Manager: Ainsley Grace
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