Ahmad Maksoud (left) plays Sammy and Glenn Morizio is Kevin in Clarence Coo’s play On That Day in Amsterdam.
On That Day in Amsterdam begins on a morning in 2015, after two young men have hooked up at a dance club in the Dutch metropolis. One of them, Kevin (Glenn Morizio), an American of Filipino extraction, is impatient to depart: he has a flight back to America later in the day, and he feels no emotional connection. The other, Sammy (Ahmad Maksoud), hopes to know Kevin better and nudges him to have breakfast. A heavy snow delays Kevin’s trip, and what ensues in Clarence Coo’s emotionally reverberating play expands to far more than a gay love story: it is a moving drama about life’s fleeting encounters, loss, nostalgia, home, art, and memory, told in scenes that skip through centuries.
As Kevin and Sammy wander through Amsterdam, they learn snippets of each other’s lives. They are also tracked by a Dutch chorus: Rembrandt (Brandon Mendez Homer), Vincent van Gogh (Jonathan Raviv), and Anne Frank (Elizabeth Ramos), who narrate in tandem, often like an incantation. They escort the audience backward and forward in time, slipping into their own lives and occasionally becoming the young characters’ older selves. Often their interaction lends a subtle, comic air to the piece:
Kevin: Oh, look. It’s snowing!
Rembrandt: On that day, the snow was falling softly in Amsterdam.
Van Gogh: On that day, the snow was falling heavily in Amsterdam.
Frank: In Amsterdam, the snow fell.
Elizabeth Ramos plays Anne Frank, and Jonathan Raviv is her father, in Clarence Coo’s drama. Photographs by Carol Rosegg.
In this Goldilocks atmosphere, each person views events through a slightly different lens. Morizio skillfully traces Kevin’s growing awareness of his privilege and concern for Sammy. Maksoud infuses his Syrian refugee, who is torn about making his way illegally to England to join his brother, with both optimism and agony.
One of Coo’s interests is what it takes to become an artist. Kevin has declared that he wants to be a writer, and he buys a notebook to record the day’s events. Sammy, meanwhile, takes photographs, including one of a swan rising from a canal. (Rembrandt, Frank and van Gogh all claim to have seen a swan fly up from that spot in their lifetimes.) As the day’s adventures continue, they visit the tourist places: Frank’s house, the Van Gogh Museum, and Rembrandt’s home. They encounter a famous photographer (Homer) who looks at Sammy’s picture of the swan and declares that it is art in spite of Sammy’s disbelief in his own talent. Finally, the young men enter the Rijksmuseum, so near to closing that they have time to see only one painting.
Along with questions of what makes an artist, Coo is concerned with what constitutes “home.” In the course of the play, Rembrandt, trusting in his own genius, buys an expensive house that stretches his finances, and Frank learns from her father (Raviv) that they must move to a hidden apartment. As for van Gogh, he determines to leave Amsterdam for Paris to find artistic inspiration, against the advice of his brother Theo (Homer), already living in the City of Light.
Coo punctuates the adventures of the young men with news reports the chorus relates about actual refugees trying to reach Europe and dying as they try to find a new home. One of the dead men is a Kurd named Baris Yazgi:
Van Gogh: His dead body was found in the water embracing a violin case.
Frank: Inside was his instrument as well as some handwritten compositions.
Van Gogh: Kevin will read this in the news five years from that day in Amsterdam.
Brandon Mendez Homer (left) plays Theo van Gogh, and Raviv is his brother, Vincent, in a scene from On That Day in Amsterdam.
Kevin, who reads many reports about dead refugees, is haunted through the years by the meeting with Sammy and his own failure to ask enough questions of him—as well as of his own mother, an illegal immigrant who, like Sammy, could never return home.
Director Zi Alikhan maintains the threads of the various narratives so that it’s always clear what century we’re in and who is speaking, and he skillfully uses the small stage, whose main feature is a raised platform. He is aided by the visual riches of Nicholas Hussong’s prolific projections (albeit at times overused), from the faces of Kevin and Sammy in real time cast onto the scrim fronting the stage, to replications of TV static and test patterns, to colors that suggest a van Gogh, to an enlarged portion of The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselijn, the painting at the Rijksmuseum that Sammy and Kevin ultimately see.
On That Day in Amsterdam is a fantasia of poetry, poignancy and compassion, the work of a writer who is able to create overlapping worlds with remarkable skill. His is a voice that’s a pleasure to discover.
The Primary Stages production of On That Day in Amsterdam plays through Sept. 4 at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information visit 59e59.org.
