Ephraim Burney (left) stars in As Time Goes By as Adam, a commitment-phobic, 33-year-old New Yorker who swipes right on David (Joel Myers, right) and gets more than what he bargained for. Photo by Chris Ruetten Photography
By Samuel Eli Shepherd
March 12, 2025
Before we meet Adam in As Time Goes By, a new off-Broadway play about gay male hookup culture, we meet his apartment.
Overlooking Riverside Drive, Adam’s studio is every modern Manhattanite’s dream. The bedsheets are a subtle, masculine grey. A record player spins next to an exposed brick wall. The only clutter in the room consists of a couple of scattered cardboard boxes that give us a clue as to how recently Adam moved in. And, in what I first thought was surely a production mistake, a mezuzah hangs on the inside of the door, not the apartment’s exterior.
Staring at the set while waiting for the play to start, I found myself thinking, “Wow, I could never afford to live in a place like this. This is so nice,” and also, “OK, but what kind of deranged human being can keep an apartment so freakishly clean?”
The ensuing 90 minutes wrestles with, but does not fully answer, that question. Adam (Ephraim Barney) starts the play lying in bed post-orgasm with David (Joel Myers), another, younger gay man who he met on Grindr. Their interactions are short and curt. Adam gives David instructions on how to use his shower, then he quickly changes the bedsheets. Adam barks at David when his towel starts dripping on the hardwood floor. The two avoid eye contact and even turn around as the other changes.
It’s a hookup with all the transactional markings of a one-time Grindr fling: steamy and passionate, then suddenly cold and detached. That is, until David reveals he can’t get a ride back to his apartment because of a blizzard outside. Adam, who has been referring to David as “Derek” up until this point, begrudgingly lets David stay over until the storm passes. The characters learn each other’s names — and each other’s clashing personalities. It’s a modern take on The Odd Couple, only if Oscar and Felix had previously known each other as headless torsos on a cruising app.
Oh, and the reason Adam has a mezuzah on the inside of his apartment, rather than the exterior? “The knock,” Adam tells David, referring to his fear of “The Nazis. The Romans. The Spanish Inquisition” coming to his door. Adam realizes David is Jewish as well. “I mean…they took plenty off,” David says.
The scene is one of the many ways As Time Goes By uses both humor and gut punches to illustrate the anxieties of the modern gay male dating scene. However, the play also relies heavily on archetypes — and stereotypes of Jewish men — to deliver its thesis on gay male loneliness, which prevents the story from progressing from a one-time fling into a more meaningful, long-term relationship.
“The play should feel fun, sad, tense, wonderfully gay, and dreadfully Jewish,” playwright Danny Brown writes in the play’s production notes.
When I saw the play at Theatre 154 last Wednesday, it certainly felt fun. The comedic bits between Adam and David are snappy and smart, in large part due to the actors’ excellent chemistry. The two build off each other’s screwball-meets-cynic chemistry as if they are Spongebob and Squidward duking it out in the Upper West Side.
Noah Eisenberg’s direction makes full use of the set while being masterfully restrained. The characters dance around their emotions as they play with levels and body language across every nook of the apartment. Their bodies often hover over each other as they spar, but the two actors never touch. The characters appear authentic and comfortable on stage, even when in close contact, likely thanks to the play’s use of an intimacy coordinator, Kimi Handa Brown.
Joel Myers, fresh off a two-year run as Albus Potter in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway, brings a dynamic physicality to David: an earnest 24-year-old who is already confident in his sexuality, but is secretly yearning for something deeper. Ephraim Birney, in turn, effectively keeps his guard up as Adam: the prickly, 33-year-old host, who, as the evening goes on, reveals himself to be less self-assured than his casual lifestyle makes it all appear.
However, the “Jewishness” advertised in the show’s synopsis is rooted in surface-level stereotypes. Adam is cartoonishly fussy, from how he organizes his underwear drawer, to not allowing David to sit on the bed after he just changed the sheets. There are some deeper conversations about Jewish vulnerability sprinkled in — for example, Adam discusses how antisemitism is partially why it is impossible for him to live outside New York — but simply being paranoid does not make a compelling or rounded Jewish character.
Though David is easygoing and bubbly, and doesn’t conform to any stereotypes, the script doesn’t flesh out his Jewish identity in any meaningful way, either. The play could work just as well with characters of any cultural background — which would be fine, if the play didn’t explicitly bill itself as being about “gay, Jewish men.”
To its credit, play also tackles generational differences in the gay community, and with much greater effect than it does Jewish identity. There is only a nine-year age difference between Adam and David, but Brown reminds us still how much has changed for gay men even in recent history.
We learn that Adam’s commitment issues stem from the fact that he came of age during Proposition 8: a 2008 piece of legislation that nearly banned gay marriage in California. (I had to Google it.) He is squeamish when discussing bottoming and self-conscious about appearing too effeminate or vulnerable. David, on the other hand, came out in high school and is comfortable discussing the messy details of sex, but he carries more prejudice about HIV/AIDS than his millennial partner.
Like other gay plays set in the post-AIDS generation, such as Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, Brown discusses topics like PrEP, dating app culture and marriage in an honest, open way. He covers taboo topics with sensitivity, but since Brown’s play is a two-hander with characters of similar demographics, there’s a limit to how thoroughly the script can explore any particular topic.
For example, Adam says he got PrEP on his health insurance, even though he knows it wasn’t necessary for his lifestyle. The play doesn’t have a working-class character to point out the privilege in Adam’s point, nor does it have an older character to argue against Adam’s insistence that gay marriage is a waste of time.
As Time Goes By is a darkly comic window into the lives of two gay men navigating a vast and heartless sexual marketplace. Appropriately, it’s currently playing on Christopher Street, where I could hear Grindr pings mere blocks away. While the story is not quite universal — and the Jewish themes are less prominent than advertised — the play is an unsentimental dive into the dark underbelly of modern gay dating. Consider it for your next night out of theater. The play is sexy and gripping, just don’t expect it to stay around and cuddle.
As Time Goes By is currently playing at 154 Christopher Street until March 30.
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