Theatre in Review: On That Day in Amsterdam (Primary Stages/59E59)Time is the antagonist in Clarence Coo's play, which oddly calls to mind Vincente Minnelli's classic film The Clock while confidently addressing a world of contemporary sorrows. As in The Clock, a casual meeting leads to romance, but a deadline awaits and decisions must be made; as this is not an MGM film, the ending will contain more than its share of heartbreak -- if, indeed, it can be said to end at all. Coo, a new face to New York theatregoers -- a 2019 production of this play was postponed by Primary Stages -- has a novelist's sensibility combined with a taste for theatrical flourishes. The situation in On That Day in Amsterdam, at first glance a natural for the page, is massaged by the playwright and his director, Zi Alikhan, into a touching and entirely stage-worthy meditation on the strange ways our lives are shaped by the facts of history, the distortions of memory, and the consolations of art. The play begins with a one-night stand. Kevin, an American college student, and Sammy, a Syrian refugee, meet in a dance club and enjoy a night of ecstatic sex. As it happens, both are leaving Amsterdam the next evening, so they spend the day together, seeing the sights and falling, by degrees, in love. It's not as easy as it looks: Kevin is cagey, averse to intimacy, forever keeping an eye trained on his watch lest he miss his train to the airport. Sammy only wants to immerse himself in the here and now, reveling in his lover's presence while savoring one of the world's most beautiful cities. They make a strange pair, perched on either side of the divide caused by war and a globalized economy. The apparently privileged Kevin has been touring the Continent for the summer following a difficult year at school. Sammy is scheduled to be smuggled into the UK, where his brother and a job await; an earlier attempt, via boat, was a disaster, forcing Sammy to witness the death of innocents. But things aren't entirely what they seem: Kevin, whose ancestry is Filipino, is the only child of an undocumented single mother who refuses to disclose her past or the identity of Kevin's father. He and his mother make an uncomfortable family of two. Sammy's parents are dead. ("They were obsessed with a country that doesn't exist anymore," he says. "And they dreamt of a country that could never possibly exist. That's how they got killed.") But his brother is determined to bring him to a better life in the West. Thus, Kevin, who has no identifiable history, and Sammy, in flight from his past and facing a perilous future, share a brief encounter in a city where antiquity exists in layers that can be glimpsed under the surface of modernity. Making this point most strongly are three supporting actors cast as contemporary characters who are also the shades of Rembrandt and his wife, Vincent van Gogh and his brother Theo, and Anne Frank and her father Otto; their interludes comment obliquely on the evanescent nature of Kevin and Sammy's romance. This trio also acts as a collective narrator, noting how, years later, Kevin -- now a successful writer -- struggles to commit his now-fading memory of love to paper, trying, like the artists mentioned above, to leave behind something that matters. It's a heady, deeply poignant work from an unusually thoughtful playwright capable of holding the present tense and the long view in remarkable harmony. At first, you might think On That Day in Amsterdam is overloaded with tropes, including the almost incantatory use of the play's title, but the gradual coming together of these two lonely, spiritually displaced, men, is hard to resist. And you're likely to be haunted by the many unanswered questions that linger when the lights come up, not least of which is Sammy's fate. (That last point weighs heavily on Kevin, who, for years after, finds himself obsessively drawn to every news report of another refugee disaster.) The actors go a long way toward engaging us in this tale of a casual fling with unexpected and long-lasting consequences. Glenn Morizio finds the lost soul within Kevin, who initially comes off as tough and chilly. (He is, after all, running around Europe on his mother's credit card, without telling her.) Ahmad Maksoud makes Sammy into Kevin's intriguing opposite, an apparently sunny, open personality with unexpected and highly guarded depths. (The script doesn't speculate about what it is like to be gay in Syrian culture, but we certainly can.) Also fine are Brandon Mendez Homer as Rembrandt, Elizabeth Ramos as Anne, and Jonathan Raviv as Vincent. Alikhan's design team takes an oldish approach that, also seen in the recent production The Orchard, appears to be newly popular. In Jason Sherwood's scenic design, the actors are separated from the audience by the thinnest of scrims -- I'm guessing it is Hologauze, although I can't be sure -- a strategy that allows projection designer Nicholas Hussong to deepen many stage pictures with images of faces, birds in flight, starry skies, snow, and details from paintings, among a great many other things. (Hussong uses both content and live footage.) Combined with Cha See's stunningly rendered sidelight looks, the result is exceptionally visually compelling, perfectly in tune with the play's preoccupation with the seductions and treacheries of memory. Sherwood's sparely furnished stage, Lux Haac's costumes, and Fan Zhang's sound design also make vital contributions. Whatever Primary Stages' reason for the 2019 postponement of On That Day in Amsterdam, it has certainly done right by it with this production, which instantly makes the name Coo into a name to watch. His play is a singular blend of passion and cool reason, both a personal story and an assessment of the world in its current fallen state. It constitutes a remarkable debut. --David Barbour 
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