From Jerome, now at Playwrights Horizons.
Photo: Maria Baranova
From a bird’s-eye vantage, John J. Caswell Jr.’s Jerome follows that classic story structure of a mysterious stranger coming to town, except that this time, the town barely exists anymore. According to the sign on the set before the curtain rises, the population of Jerome, an actual former copper-mining town in central Arizona, has evaporated, giving it ghost status. The people who live around it in highland-desert isolation have, like those fish that curl up in isolated water holes in Death Valley, evolved some serious quirks — notably, Con (Stephen Spinella) and Doane (Jeorge Bennett Watson), a gay couple in their 60s who live according to very specific preferences. They decorate for holidays on a schedule. They tape the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on a VCR and fast-forward through the commercials after going fishing. And every year, they attend the Northern Arizona Pride Alliance’s Bloodsucker Ball. There, in 1992, with Doane dressed as Nina Simone and Con in a fur suit as a literal bear, they meet that mysterious stranger.
If the town here isn’t really a town, the stranger’s mystery isn’t exactly a mystery either. Once you note the date and the fact that the handsome arrival, named Bruin (Ken Barnett), has recently left San Francisco, you pretty quickly connect the dots. Caswell gently unspools the details of Bruin’s past — no one explicitly mentions “AIDS” or “HIV” or even a “disease” — but the ongoing plague hangs in the minds of this trio of gay men, even in the middle of nowhere. “This isn’t Timbuktu, compadre,” as Doane says. “We get the evening news.” Eager to mix up their routines, and drawn to the way the muscular Bruin looks in his He-Man outfit at the Halloween ball, Doane and Con latch on to the idea of a threesome. They fumble through foreplay,and talk around safe sex. Bruin says he’s been celibate for two and a half years. The sound of Doane’s watch alarm sends him into something like a panic attack — you and he think of AZT — but it’s just for a statin. Bruin stays on in Jerome and becomes a part of Doane and Con’s dynamic, but there’s a lacuna within their triad, some way the epidemic has touched Bruin that he doesn’t want to express and that the members of the couple can’t reach.
I had a professor in college who used to suggest that you write an essay, cut everything but the last paragraph, and then restart the argument from there, which is advice that might also apply to Jerome itself. Which is to say that Jerome both assembles the materials for great drama and holds itself back from igniting them. Caswell and the director, Dustin Wills, are exceptionally good at evoking the atmosphere of the high desert and in dramatizing the lived-in texture of a relationship that has developed its own rhythms and is just now being interrupted. Caswell’s style is at once naturalistically observed — if you’ve heard a gay throuple bicker, you’ll recognize the patter — and full of symbolic free association. Here, references to bears (in Bruin’s name, Colin’s fur suit, and Doane’s favorite hockey team), the talismanic power of household appliances, and the sunken earth keep recurring. Wills designed Jerome’s inventive and pleasurably tactile sets. There’s a twirling, decorated-for-every-holiday tree and a stone wall to one side of the stage sprouting plant growth, which stands in for the basalt that anchors Con and Doane’s home to a mountainside. Caswell and Wills previously collaborated on the former’s great and pleasurably cacophonous Wet Brain, another drama that melded together life in Arizona, queer loneliness, flights of the surreal (there, aliens; here, a visit to a mine), aging, and alcoholism (which becomes an element of Jerome) but accumulated those ideas at a breakneck pace. As Bruin settles into life with Con and Doane in Jerome, you can see the dramatic levers Caswell intentionally isn’t pulling — not pushing the dynamic of a throuple for melodrama, not overplaying the context of AIDS — and the restraint makes Jerome politely respectful but not gripping. Once Bruin’s secrets come spilling out in an extended and very funny scene in a fishing boat during the second act, I thought, Oh, great, let’s start here.
Still, there are pleasures to be had in the slow build and, as Con and Doane have found, in the comfort of lives lived in just the particular way these men have decided to live them. “You learn what you like; that’s what happens after the decades,” Con snaps at Bruin when he questions the logic of the Thanksgiving routine. Spinella’s presence in a play like Jerome is immediately resonant, given his association with Angels of America — especially since he’s here playing someone who, like Prior Walter, is reckoning with human frailty. You feel for Con deeply and immediately, as soon as you see Spinella struggling to stand in his bear outfit and grousing about his medication. Spinella shucks off sentimentality, always showing us Con’s offhand humor and sometimes nervous, defensive rambling. Watson across from him grounds their duo with a drillmaster’s sense of duty. The two of them met during the Korean War, we learn, and you feel the touch of military life, both its rigor and its repression, in Doane’s bearing and a sometimes inarticulate sense of his desires.
Barnett’s Bruin, in turn, unlocks those desires — Wills stages a haunting and sexy moment where Bruin does tai chi with a toy sword of power that’s probably thematically richer than anything in the He-Man film that’s coming out this week. While it’s always difficult to play a blank, Barnett emphasizes an engaging loneliness and need in a man who has long been admired for his body. In performance and direction, and in the small ways in which Caswell and Wills have plotted out this isolated love story, there’s a level of great richness and detail. It’s a poignant construction: As the unspoken epidemic eliminates so many gay men of their generation, these men are still carrying a torch out in the wilderness. The gesture of queerness survives in the harshest of climates. (Con and Duane are proud, too, to own a house they speculate was built by 19th-century lesbians.) Even as I sensed the slack in Jerome’s plotting, I wouldn’t mind spending more time with Con and Doane, having them tuck me into bed and put on an episode of Murder, She Wrote. They seem like great hosts — as long as you never say anything bad about Angela Lansbury.
Jerome is at Playwrights Horizons through June 21.
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