‘The Gold Room’ Review: Gay Sexuality on Shuffle Mode – The New York Times

Showing up to a stranger’s house for sex may seem provocative to some, but it’s become a mundane interaction among gay men who use apps like Grindr. Still, such encounters are loaded with profound questions that are often dispensed with in a blink. What does it mean to separate sex from intimacy? How does shame interfere with vulnerability?

The two men circling each other in “The Gold Room,” now playing at Here, perform an abstract excavation of gay sexuality, its present-day mores and psychological undercurrents (spoiler alert, daddy issues ahead). But the playwright Jacob Perkins does not throw stones (the set by Emona Stoykova is appropriately glass-walled), indicting the broader cultural forces that influence and constrict gay men, a familiar mode for artists who’ve traversed similar territory. “The Gold Room” rather turns inward, to fantasies and everyday doubts that many who share the playwright’s experience will recognize.

A chlamydia scare is not the icebreaker one would think to use with a hookup, but Robert Stanton’s character, an unnamed early career playwright, is recalling how it hurt to pee while his prospect, played by Scott Parkinson, grabs beers in the next room. Did he forget to mention that it was only a dream? The next moment, they’re engaging in aggressive verbal role play, then agreeing to another round. Stanton continues to probe his character’s psyche (he recounts a second elaborate dream, about his father cross-dressing) as Parkinson takes on a series of shifting roles — a reluctant producer encouraging the writer to tone down the eroticism of his work, a proctologist assuring him he did nothing to deserve hemorrhoids, an experienced lover instructing him to use “an ocean’s worth” of lube.

One scene moves into the next with the ease and illogic of a subconscious on shuffle mode, with lighting by greer x, and occasional gusts of haze, marking the subtle shifts. Presented by i am a slow tide, and directed by the artistic director Gus Heagerty, the production has an elegant polish that suggests a more assured purpose than “The Gold Room” conveys over its hourlong running time. “I don’t know if it’s a work,” Stanton’s writer admits of the record he’s been keeping of his dreams, adding that they might not mean anything. The expression of insecurity seems to belong as much to Perkins as to his onstage surrogate.

There is a therapy-couch feel to the play’s unprocessed reflections, and a lack of perspective that results from such sustained navel gazing. Perkins writes in the script that the two men may be cast with actors of any race, so long as they are both the same, suggesting a kind of mirroring. That note seems blind to the context of privilege, though, at a time when its acknowledgment has become essential to many conversations about difference. When talk turns to feeling unsafe, and to the monsters that always seem to be lying in wait outside the door, it’s tough not to consider that other facets of identity tend to offer some protection.

The Gold Room
Through Nov. 5 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour.