Two young men wander the city before they both must say farewell and return to very different lives.
Sammy’s parents used to rhapsodize about the trip they took to Paris once, before he was born. Hearing their stories made the city shimmer in his imagination, but the closest he’s ever gotten to it was on a nonstop drive across France.
Hidden in the back of a truck, peering through a hole in its side, he glimpsed a highway sign that said Paris. Then the driver blew past it, on through the darkness toward Amsterdam.
In Clarence Coo’s play “On That Day in Amsterdam,” that’s where Sammy is on the night in 2015 when he meets Kevin at a club. They are young and beautiful, something sparks between them, and they wake together the next morning in a houseboat on a canal. Outside, snow is falling.
Sammy is Syrian and without a passport, hoping to reach safety in England but terrified of the journey across the water to get there. Kevin is American, not wealthy but privileged anyway, a college student traveling on the credit card his mother pays for.
While both are scheduled to leave the Netherlands that night, they have very different notions of how precious it is to be passing through, even briefly. Sammy (Waseem Alzer), who is sweet, eager and daring in his vulnerability, wants to grab this day with both hands and go on a tourist adventure. Kevin (Glenn Morizio), who is callow, arrogant and incurious in ways that he will come to regret, eventually acquiesces.
It’s a bit of a Richard Linklater, “Before Sunrise” setup: just-met lovers with mere hours to spend together in a glamorous foreign capital. And on the largest stage at 59E59 Theaters, the set by Jason Sherwood (a two-time Emmy Award winner) conspires with projections by Nicholas Hussong (a 2022 Tony Award nominee for his spectacular projections in “Skeleton Crew”) and lighting by Cha See to bring visual texture and depth to Sammy and Kevin’s ramble through Amsterdam.
There is the nagging sense, though, that design is the tail wagging the dog in this Primary Stages production from Zi Alikhan — that the set’s transparent downstage screen, which frames the action, constrains the performers somehow, and that the copious projections, on that screen and another upstage, could have used some editing. Yes to the moody, abstract and dreamy, emphatically yes to the striped blocks of color that represent evening windows; no to the drably literal, which only gets in the way of the poetry that Coo is reaching for.
The playwright, too, has also overwhelmed the show, with a surfeit of ideas jostling for limited oxygen. This is a quasi-romance and coming-of-age story set inside a refugee crisis in a world awash in bigotry. But it’s also about art as a necessary solace, which is what it provides to Sammy, who wants to take his mind off the peril he’s in by popping into some museums. Kevin, though, is a tortured would-be writer; the making of an artist is much on Coo’s mind as well.
The play might be able to manage all of that, yet it also collapses time to usher in three famous former residents of Amsterdam: Rembrandt (Brandon Mendez Homer), Vincent van Gogh (Jonathan Raviv) and Anne Frank (Elizabeth Ramos). Anne, at least, fits the principal themes: She was both an artist and a migrant fleeing — and hiding from — danger. But these characters’ interstitial-feeling scenes fit awkwardly with the whole.
The result is a play too overcrowded for fullness. What sticks in the memory is Alzer’s lovely Sammy, grasping at a few hours of normalcy, cherishing the chance to lose himself in throngs of tourists who, with their documents in order, are free to come and go.
On That Day in Amsterdam
Through Sept. 4 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
