Review: "The Sex Writer," I Just Can’t Get Enough

The Sex Writer

Written by Adam Szymkowicz

Directed by Philip Cruise

Presented by Thin Duke Productions and SparkPlug Productions at The Gene Frankel Theatre

24 Bond St, Manhattan, NYC

October 30-November 17, 2024

Seth Gilliam, Sionne Elise. Photo by Mark Veltman.
Adam Szymkowicz’s excellent new play, The Sex Writer, probes questions of loss, love, and the writer’s vocation as Jane, (sex) writer and professor at Columbia, returns to her small-town childhood home on the occasion of her father’s death by suicide. Upon her return, Jane is reunited with an old flame, Aiden, and simultaneously rekindles her relationship to her former lover, her hometown, her father, and her writing.

A bed sits at center stage and will remain there throughout the play. It is flanked by a writer’s desk and pages from an undetermined source pinned to the walls, providing a perfect codex to the production: sex and writing and their interpenetration are inescapable. As the action, and Jane, develop, we see the writer’s desk take its rightful place center stage, yet still framed by the ever-present and well-used bed, so that the significance of the bodily and interpersonal within the writing process remains visually inescapable.
Christopher Lee, Sionne Elise, Tammi Cubilette, Seth Gilliam, Callie Fabac Photo by Mark Veltman.
Ever the erudite writer, Jane narrates for the audience throughout the performance, allowing us to focalize through her, to see how she sees this string of lovers and her contentious relationship with a father – also a writer, and a rather important one at that.

Jane is played by the inimitable Tammi Cubilette, who is the hub of the production: not only the lead but the center of gravity around which the players and action orbit. Her capacity for laughter, lust, remorse, and a sympathetic tear hold the audience close throughout the 75-minute production. It is impossible to look away from the complexity and magnetism of this performance.

The always-magnetic Seth Gilliam inhabits the role of Aiden. Gilliam’s performance is pitch perfect and incredibly funny (we get both body humor as well as lines that hit their mark each time), filled with that elusive, alchemic brew of bravado and vulnerability which yields a deeply sympathetic performance and holds the audience thoroughly rapt. Further, the chemistry between Cubilette and Gilliam is undeniable as they hash out what their relationship was all those years ago and what it might look like moving forward, drawing out the magic of Szymkowicz’s script.
Tammi Cubilette, Seth Gilliam. Photo by Mark Veltman.
Importantly, Szymkowicz’s writing accomplishes the incredibly difficult task of addressing sex, writing, and death, and still creating an effervescent and quite funny text. The dialogue blends joy and pain. As we watch Jane’s odyssey across lovers and states and eventually finding someplace like home, the narrative and dialogue never feel saccharine; the emotions are deeply felt, and the catharsis well-earned.

Director Phillip Cruise also deserves effusive praise for both his unified vision and playful staging of intimacy. Incredibly playful (and yet, importantly, sexy) dance numbers stand in for sex scenes between the dyad, with one particularly effective interaction set to Depeche Mode’s 1981 banger “I Just Can’t Get Enough.” Szymkowicz’s play requires intimacy: it is in the DNA of the work, and Cruise handles it deftly.

The Sex Writer is a sexy, poignant, and expertly executed production and testament to the powers of introspection, empathy, and a well-turned phrase.

-Noah Simon Jampol

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