Taylor Coriell | Thank You, Places / 2024

on stage confession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Madison Hatfield (screenplay), Taylor Coriell (director) Thank You, Places / 2024 [8 minutes]

 

It’s rather hard to imagine that in 2024 there were two film productions of works about small Community theater companies with the same title of Thank You, Places, one a short, the other—which I’ve still to see—a feature film. This US production of September (the other was released in November), features two actors, Jimmy (Braian Rivera Jimenez) and Grant (Jono Mitchell), performing in a truly bad play on the amateur theater circuit.

     Jimmy plays the man who gets shot and killed at the end of the play, perhaps an appropriate role such he has just been dumped by his former older lover, Grant who plays the detective who shoots him in the last scene.

     Most of their conversation concerns Jimmy’s anger and hurt for Grant’s sudden reversal of feelings; but it’s also clear that Grant is still terrified of making commitments. He claims he can’t go on in a relationship that will merely hurt the other. But Jimmy, in his bitterness, makes a strong claim for his love as well as his commitment to theater, while performing in a play that Grant, who has at least performed off-Broadway, cannot even abide to perform. And he is a cold fish when it comes to Jimmy’s impassioned pleas that he continue what he had begun—somewhat like going on with the play that one knows is an absolute turkey.

    We hear the lines of the play from the backstage dressing room to where the two men retreat after their scenes. And the person responsible for getting them on stage on time, does come by to remind there that they should return to their places, whom they snottily thank in the manner of the film’s title.

     Jimmy comes back with a ketchup-covered shirt, and washes away the bit of tomato that splattered against he face, as Grant returns to the stage for his last scene.

      But this time instead of performing his regular lines about the character, he begins a long admission of how he has been in love with the man he has killed, and treated him badly because of his own inability to fully love. We only hear this, as does Jimmy, over the dressing room speakers, but we can imagine the other cast members' startlement of extensive ad-lib with adds perhaps more dimension to the plot that perhaps the original was able to muster up. Grant’s last line is almost ludicrous, “I’ve got to see if he’s still dead. Crack the case without me Rita.”

     He returns, and the two kiss. A night to remember both for them and their obviously confused audience.

     Alas, the movie is as trite and silly as the play in which the characters are performing, The Dock Woman by Lin Liam.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).