The Brooklyn Rail

Juliet’s concocted a plan for her indoorsy, forlorn, sweet but friendless boyfriend: she’ll pay people to spend time with him, cracking open an intriguing and not-as-simple-as-it-seems examination of the correlation between money spent and care received.

Ian Reid’s charming, gently-pitched comedy, Heaven is a place in the sky, which completed its week-long run directed by Jake Beckhard at The Tank on September 8, is not the first play to dig into how the economics of caregiving impact the minutiae of relationships. Other contemporary works—Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane and Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living—focus on physically disabled characters, where the price and exchange of care can seem more visible. Writing alongside these Broadway titans, Reid excavates such intricacies with equal specificity for his able-bodied characters.

That writing yields a kind of analysis not often explored on stage as Reid puts the monetary transactions between patient and therapist, friend and friend, and Uber driver and passenger on display in often subtle, moving ways.

Juliet, well-paid in a high-rise Hudson Yards office, is flush with disposable income. It affords her boyfriend, Geoff, time to shop at Whole Foods and make chutney. But, while Juliet’s job keeps her busy, it increases Geoff’s isolation. Justifying her secret strategy to her therapist, Juliet hires two endearing, dopey actors: McCoy and Rosenberg, who wants to compare the gig to sex work. “But then I thought that wasn’t polite,” he says.

Paid sex sex can be fleeting—a one-and-done situation. Friendship, as intended, is more enduring. Nonetheless, the check clears, the actors play their roles, and Geoff comes alive.

He spends time eating hot dogs on Coney Island with his new “friends,” rhapsodizes his fridge’s “pluot” (plum plus apricot) sorbet that breaks the summer heat, and, his mood energized, becomes more physical with Juliet.

Every gift has been purchased. Does that make each less meaningful?

It does for Geoff once he discovers the scheme. Juliet puppeteered his universe, and despite her attempt to foster Geoff’s relationships, she has dissolved her own. A breakup ensues in which Juliet lays bare her outlook.

“I am not going to let you stand here in front of me, in the beautiful apartment that I pay for, and tell me that we’re somehow living in some utopian, egalitarian—that you’re suddenly too good for my money, because you’re not. You’re not. You’ve taken it. Month after month,” she says.

Instead of pushing Geoff and Juliet toward poles of the manipulated and manipulator, Reid’s character building allows room for deeper hues.

Geoff is three-dimensional; he’s not a token goofy, layabout boyfriend. Like Reid’s writing, Geoff is breezy and delightful, and those qualities don’t impede him from also being lonely and friend-hungry. Feel how he opens up when he realizes, with McCoy and Rosenberg beside him on a cloudless day, how friendship invites him to adopt multiple selves, one to embody around each person he loves.

“You can be all kinds of guys in the summertime,” McCoy says.

“You can be a Guy Who Surfs. Or you can be a Guy Who Bikes Shirtless,” Rosenberg says.

“You can be a Guy Who Grills,” McCoy adds.

Geoff says it’s a lot to choose from, that he can’t be everything, he can’t be opposites.

“You can be whatever,” McCoy tells him.

In these moments, Reid’s dialogue, pure as the sky on the trio’s beach day, absolutely stirs.

As Geoff’s life expands, Juliet’s shrinks. She, like Geoff, is actually quite chill, a refreshing take on a high-paid corporate drone. Their relationship makes sense, but Juliet’s work at a financial institution has seeped, subconsciously, into every corner of her life. For Juliet, commodities—rent, groceries, friends, therapy—can be bought, and as such controlled. The tragedy isn’t that Geoff lacks money and is unhappy; it’s that Juliet has money and doesn’t know she’s unhappy. Cash is her opiate.

Her friend Whitney, as a non-profit employee, has a more clear-eyed relationship to wealth. It’s never been there, so it’s never corrupted; nonetheless, Whitney is still in love with Juliet, or perhaps the figment of who she was in college, where they met.

But working at a do-good organization doesn’t absolve Whitney of wielding money as a way to detach. When her therapist, spiraling through her own divorce, cracks open the wine and wants to offer a free session, approximating something more like a “girls’ night,” Whitney balks. Yes, the therapist crossed a personal boundary, but more importantly, “It’s not a job if I’m not paying you,” Whitney says.

An Uber driver—McCoy, when he’s not acting—whisks her away from the strange session. Here is a different therapist, an anonymous, on-the-clock person whose service-oriented job renders them a sympathetic ear. Such workers permeate everyday life: barbers, waiters, bartenders. When the therapist, tipsy, heads into a dive, she unloads on her bartender, her own personal shrink. “You’re very good at your job, you know that?” she says, calling to mind the toxic relationship at the heart of the Netflix series Baby Reindeer, in which an outcast customer obsessively sits in the same barkeep’s chair.

Often attuned, Reid’s exploration of excessive wealth, and the destruction it breeds, can also be heavy-handed. (What play today is not, in some way, addressing capitalism?) There are recurring references to Jeff Bezos and his hopeful demise, which feel inserted and pierce the play’s nuanced world of internal relationships.

The denouement can linger, but the play avoids Hallmark moments without sacrificing its earned nostalgia. And how can there not be some yearning? Summer is ending, a new season approaches, relationships have withered and died.

“A lot of people get wistful at this time of summer,” the therapist says.

“I hate wistfulness,” Juliet responds.

Still, her earth has cracked, and Reid charts for her a slow, almost imperceptible realization that she might actually be experiencing an emotion she can’t pay to fix: melancholy.

Seeing others as economic units has narrowed Juliet’s perspective. But there’s a whole city out there, and Heaven is a place in the sky is a plea for connection. It also posits an older, pre-smartphone New York may have been a more open, neighborly place.

In a walk-on role, a stranger approaches Geoff on the street looking for a light. (Cigarettes destroy lungs but engage breath.) A conversation ensues. It’s nothing glorious, and it doesn’t have to be—but: Reid insists there are people—kind, weird people—around these characters every day, and how they engage with them is a choice, and a reflection of their, and New York City’s, values.

Strangers are on the street, strangers are in the city’s priced-out third places, strangers are on the subway. In a final, affecting gesture, Geoff and Juliet board the same train home at different times. They awkwardly chitchat and decide on sleeping arrangements as they search for new apartments. Then, the train bursts out of the ground.

Sunlight pours in with the audience, a train full of passengers, illuminated. Juliet is surrounded by people. Maybe she sees them. Maybe she doesn’t.