Image via Out Front Theatre Company
As it happens, this year is the 35th anniversary of Jerker, Or The Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Phone Calls, Many of Them Dirty, a one act play by Robert Chesley. I was reminded of the occasion by news of an upcoming on-screen production by Atlanta’s Out Front Theatre. Considered a queer classic and in the canon of LGBTQ literature (“one of most important pieces of gay theater ever created” according to the Los Angeles Times), it is a study of the challenges of love and intimacy during the most horrific stage of the AIDS pandemic when gay men were dropping dead with no therapy in sight. As the title implies, the play’s device is the telephone. The characters communicate solely via those 20 calls. Phone sex and a relationship ensue. The last calls, however, go unanswered.
Theatre X debuted Jerker (under the self-consciously abbreviated title Jerker: An Elegy in Twenty Phone Calls, Many of them Dirty—it’s Milwaukee, after all) in 1990 as a fund raiser for the Milwaukee AIDS Project. Back in 2013, Milwaukee’s Boulevard Theater, under the direction of Mark Bucher, produced the play as a concert staging, renting the LGBT Community Center’s community room as its venue.
The two-character play featured the sonorous Bill Jackson and the fresh-faced Marty McNamee. Bucher’s hands-on aplomb and astute insight delivered another of his masterfully directed stagings. It should be mentioned that the play’s interracial cast with its diversity of age added even more dimension to the production’s dynamics.
I attended the opening night performance and found myself thoroughly enthralled and moved. I had survived through those early disastrous years and the play’s reality was all too familiar. Also in attendance was a local theater critic. He was not so enthralled.
A Matter of Taste
Admittedly, graphic in-your-face gay sex is not everyone’s cuppa. It’s all a matter of taste, after all, and, to a great degree, sensitivity. I suppose it’s one of those “you had to be there” cases in which one can better relate if one is not only sexually so inclined but also emotionally. Still, as it is in real life, the sex stuff, as specific as it was, was merely a conduit, a mere part of the greater picture. Still, the critic’s subsequent review ranted and raved about the play’s blatant sexuality, dropping the term “filth” (among others) like a Legion of Decency nun. Inadvertently, in so doing, he became part of the play, the back story, as it were, of the straight world’s reluctance to care about the humanity of LGBTQ people because of its aversion to their sexuality.
One wonders if the critique would have been so strident and squeamishly tinged had the play’s characters been straight or lesbian (straight guys like that). Lush and lurid as their interactions were, perhaps within that alternative setting the critic may have found it, if not relatable, at least accessible. In any case, Jerker’s last lines had barely been uttered when our critic hopped up and fled, slamming the theater door behind him. Imagine, if you will, a Looney Tunes’ escape scene with whirling dust clouds and a soundtrack of revving engines and squealing tires. If I recall correctly, one could hear the ring of the elevator bell above the din of the remaining audience members’ enthusiastic applause. I can easily envision the critic’s pell-mell exit from the building, collar popped, falling to the ground and gasping for air.
Nevertheless, for everyone else, Bucher delivered Jerker as the heroic and tender script that it is. I spoke to him about that night and the Boulevard Theatre’s upcoming 35th season. While noting that local mainstream companies have announced no LGBTQ relevant productions for the upcoming year, he indicated the Boulevard has some ideas in the works but remained coy about just what may be on the marquee come fall. Asked if he might reprise Jerker, he replied “I might...”
