If you didn’t know any better after watching ‘The Happy Sad’ you would be forgiven for thinking that New York is in fact a very small place where the same total strangers keep running into each other all the time. Well this two couples do anyway and in this story start out as strangers and end up …… well actually strangers still ….. as this sweet drama is cute and enjoyable, but it never gets more than skin deep.Marcus and Aaron the black gay couple have been together for six years and although still deeply in love are at the stage where they want to try an open relationship. They draw up rules as how this is to happen, and then immediately break them. Stan and Annie the white straight couple on the other hand have barely made the six month mark and over Sunday Brunch at a restaurant, Annie declares she wants to fly solo for a while. Pushed for a reason, she panics and says she is having an affair with Mandy a fellow teacher at the school where she works Their waiter who has to witness the breakup is Aaron.
Next scene and Stan has hooked up with Marcus via some Internet site and he is giving up his gay cherry to him. Strange though that Annie has never suspected her boyfriend of any homosexual tendencies, but then again, he hadn’t even realized he had them himself. Annie is a fine one to talk as her rapidly chosen excuse be comes reality and she makes out with Mandy. Soon afterwards all four bump into each other at a subway station and the penny drops about who is now sleeping with who. Except poor Aaron who is not playing around at all but is the one who picks up a nasty rash around his genitals …. go figure.
Slowly they all realise that it’s all about having what … or who … you cannot have. Marcus thinks he now loves Stan who responds to the declaration with a fist. Annie also wants Stan back now that she knows his sexuality is more fluid. Mandy who is really distraught …. not about her one night stand with Annie …. but the fact that her father has his hands amputated (don’t ask!) so she settles for a quickie in the Sauna with Alice (who naturally turns out to be a friend of Aaron …. who is incidentally is still not getting any action). Still with me?
Marcus and Annie then have big bust ups with their respective boyfriends and end up in the same bar to drown their sorrows.
The credulity of the plot is strained with a few too many co-incidences which probably made a lot more sense when this was still a stage play. There are patches of humor and of old-fashioned honesty when the piece really works, but a lot of the indecision and the flip-flopping in the drama is very strained and unconvincing.
Directed by Rodney Evans, who has taken almost a decade to follow up his award winning ‘Brother to Brother’ and stars a great wee quartet of very personable 20 something-year-old actors Cameron Scoggins, Leroy McClain Charlie Barnett and Sorel Carradine.
Cute, but it could easily have been retitled ‘The Happy Sad & Confused’.
Out now on VOD
