Review: Slanted Floors, a Voyeur’s View of One Gay New York City Household

Slanted Floors invites audiences into an authentic environment. Framed show posters and too many art books decorate a tastefully appointed one-bedroom apartment. A blue baseball cap reading “hot dads for Zohran” hangs from a hook near the door. Recent Playbills (I spotted one for The Heart) are piled like animal bones in dark corners of this cozy cave, dimly lit to masks wrinkles and receding hairlines, and to soothe the nerves following a day in the urban jungle.

Beautifully fashioned by Clint Ramos (set), Samantha Shoffner (set decorator and props), and Nick Auer (lighting), this is the natural habitat of the middle-aged mustachioed homosexual working in a creative field in New York City. I recognized it instantly, because I am one, and this is what my apartment looks like.

The show is the creation of Billy McEntee, who hosted mountings of Slanted Floors last fall and this summer for an audience of six in his Greenpoint apartment. This Manhattan transfer expands the guest list to 30, all of whom fit comfortably in the rent-stabilized Astor Place apartment that Kaplan (Adam Chanler-Berat) and Teddy (Kyle Beltran) have managed to secure through the “back doors of New York real estate.” Ryan Dobrin directs for maximum intimacy, making us voyeurs to a typical evening in the cage of two exhausted hamsters who still climb into the wheel every day.

McEntee knows of what he writes. Theater editor for The Brooklyn Rail and winner of last year’s George Jean Nathan Prize for criticism, he is that rare critic who also successfully and regularly creates theater. I have often wondered where he finds the time. Slanted Floors offers an explanation.

The play opens with a taste of Kaplan’s day as a freelance writer working from home, shared with us through a projection of his computer screen on a flatscreen television. Dan Kuan Peeples’s video design perfectly captures the frantic pace of the digital content economy, a manic gear-shifting from word processor to CMS to Teams meeting to Grindr that mimics the channel-surfing that social media has trained our brains to not only expect but crave.

Chanler-Berat meets the exhausting pace of this opening act, flitting through the apartment in a black tutu like he’s Natalie Portman, driven by a to-do list and intrusive thoughts. One repeatedly asks, “Wait, have you peed yet?” And when he finally does, it’s a torrent that could move tickets to one of NYC’s more boutique sex parties (the sound design, a disorienting mixture of fantasy and hyper-reality, is by Auer and Peeples).

The tone instantly mellows with the arrival of Teddy, a calming presence who puts on a vinyl recording of Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving and whips up a dinner of homemade soup, setting out bowls not only for himself and Kaplan, but the audience members seated around the coffee table (the rest of us must content ourselves with the olfactory experience). They chat about their day, the irksome expense of an upcoming destination wedding, and Kaplan’s recent sexcapade, a little side action. This is not a source of tension in the slightest. Kaplan’s reaction to Teddy’s most recent creative endeavor, on the other hand…

Like Kaplan, Teddy is a writer toiling in a job that pays the bills while he eeks out time for passion projects. The latest is a story about a commune in upstate New York where the residents’ desire to live off the gird clashes with a residual craving for cheap hits of dopamine. It also seems to be about how individuals change faster than the high-minded social structures around them. We get the strong sense that Teddy is trying, in his writerly way, to communicate something profound and personal to Kaplan. He lays out the whole thing after dinner as Kaplan politely listens.

McEntee has written the dramatic equivalent of a coloratura aria lasting for a good 15-20 minutes, and it is a testament to Beltran’s immense power as an actor and storyteller that he keeps us riveted. The big list of character names, the subtext bubbling beneath subtext, the digression about Amanda Palmer—we lean in, trying to discern meaning. And we’re not alone.

“So is this gonna be like a workshop kind of thing?” Chanler-Berat utters this line like a man who has attended innumerable industry readings and was expected to say something nice to the writer afterward. Teddy knows he didn’t get it, and that frustration hangs over the remainder of the play like a dark cloud that threatens rain but never breaks. A screaming-in-the-kitchen play this is not.

But I’m on Kaplan’s side. I was most confused by the role of the audience. Teddy gestures toward the inner circle as if they are the characters in his story. Are they real? Real enough for him to pour out perfectly good soup, which they hungrily consume. But then why does he leave us in his darkened living room when they turn in for the night? Neither McEntee nor Dobrin offers an explanation.

This little slice of gay life is ambiguous enough that people are bound to connect with different aspects of the play. For me, it was a quiet expression of a gnawing dissatisfaction with modern living and the expectation that we emulate the machines we spend so much time with, instead of the people we claim to love. Slanted Floors is both a plea for, and a fascinating example of, creativity and human connection unmediated by the tyranny of the screen.