Review: As Time Goes By, a Snowed-In Grindr Date

Gay men are trendsetters. We move into up-and-coming neighborhoods before they’ve up and come. We choose your cerulean sweater for you before you fish it out of some tragic clearance bin. And we arrived at the outer limits of casual indifference for our fellow man ages before the heterosexual masses now wallowing in their post-Covid anomie.

That’s obvious in the opening moments of Danny Brown’s As Time Goes By, as Adam (Ephraim Birney) shows his Grindr date, David (Joel Meyers), to the door with the same care he exhibits when tossing their used condom in the trash. But with a blizzard coming down and no cabs on Riverside Drive, David soon comes crawling back, having nowhere else to take shelter—not with the doorman, not at Fairway, not even in the 1 train. Overriding his desire for solitude, Adam unchains the door and allows David to reenter so this tortured setup can blossom into the talky, gay issue-ticking two-hander it wants to be.

As Time Goes By is now making its off-Broadway debut with Out of the Box Theatrics in association with Ice Berg Productions. A solid (though awkwardly staged) production by director Noah Eisenberg and nuanced performances give Brown’s play its best possible showing; but those bright spots never quite compensate for the naked contrivance of the script, which is mostly a vehicle for assorted gay grievances.

This isn’t so much a 90-minute issue play as it is every pressing gay topic squeezed into 90 minutes of post-coital debate. Our panelists discuss the ins-and-outs of douching, the male g-spot, top privilege, PrEP, lingering stigma around HIV, and gay marriage via a little throwback to Prop 8.

There is even a dispute about the appropriate categorization of Blondie: David insists they’re disco, but Adam informs his culturally malnourished companion that the band is, in fact, punk new wave.  Thirty-three and in possession of a record player, Adam schools his younger charge (David is 24), offering him a brief synopsis of Casablanca when he asks about his single of “As Time Goes By.”

Lest you conclude that David is just a dumb Zoomer, Meyers brings a puckish intelligence to the role, his expressive eyebrows furrowing as he probes his host for personal information. He’s less a student than a prosecutor as he dissects the fragile notions governing Adam’s life, like when he repeatedly inquires why Adam has chosen to nail his mezuzah to the inside of his door, rather than the outside, as is custom. “I don’t want them to see when they come to the door,” Adam tells him sheepishly. He’s referring to the Nazis.

As you might have discerned, Adam is a bit of a nervous nellie, a quality Birney easily conveys as Adam shuffles around the apartment performing cleanup while barking at David about where he can and cannot sit. Practically anyone could deliver a decent performance of a garden-variety neurotic, but, with just one goofy smile, Birney peels back the layers of armor Adam has acquired as a gay adult to show us the sensitive little boy still living beneath.

Eisenberg’s production might at first give the impression of high realism, between Baron E. Pugh’s oppressively gray studio apartment set and Eric Norbury’s moody winter’s eve lighting. Jess Gersz certainly costumes the two actors appropriately, with casual clothes that can be easily removed and redonned for a speedy exit. But in his attempt to make this already voyeuristic experience even more intimate (and move the two bodies into different configurations as they gab away), Eisenberg makes the mistake of seating them on the floor far downstage so that their faces are blocked by the viewers in the front row. The spell is also broken by the characters’ unexplained shyness about nudity (David changing under a towel, Adam requesting a very specific pair of briefs from the dresser while hiding in the bathroom) when they have just, you know, fucked.

Of course, this may be a commentary on the gay propensity to compartmentalize sex so that no genuine intimacy (or vulnerability) is required. That seems to be Brown’s real target, and it’s a worthwhile one. The self-imposed expectation to have as many sexual encounters as possible while feeling nothing about them is a pattern of behavior not exclusive to the gays anymore. That consumerist impulse seems like an attractive, even liberating defense mechanism in a world of great abundance that is simultaneously colder and meaner. But As Time Goes By makes a convincing case that the vast majority of us are lying to ourselves, and this self-deception won’t make us any happier as we all slowly transform into either mutants or robots.