JERKER
Funny, sexually explicit, provocative, and unexpectedly tender, Robert Chesley’s JERKER remains one of the most remarkable works to emerge from the AIDS era. First produced in 1986, the play begins with two men connecting through telephone sex. They have never met. They know very little about each other. Their conversations are anonymous, imaginative, playful, and often outrageously erotic.
As they continue calling, however, something begins to change. Between the fantasies and sexual games, the men reveal fragments of their everyday lives, their insecurities, their humor, and their growing affection. Without ever sharing a physical space, they begin to create something that looks remarkably like a relationship.
And outside those conversations, the AIDS epidemic is transforming their world.
Chesley, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, was an outspoken defender of gay sexuality at a moment when fear and shame dominated much of the public conversation about gay men.
Rather than retreat from sexual expression, he placed it at the very center of his work. He insisted that pleasure, desire, laughter, and intimacy were essential parts of gay life and deserved to be celebrated, even in the shadow of death.
That insistence made JERKER controversial. It also made the play revolutionary.
But what may surprise contemporary audiences most isn’t its explicit language or sexual frankness. It is the tenderness of the relationship that gradually emerges.
Beneath its provocative surface, JERKER is a profoundly human story about loneliness, companionship, vulnerability, and the courage it takes to love another person.
Robert Chesley was among the first American playwrights to confront the AIDS crisis directly. His groundbreaking NIGHT SWEAT (1984) was one of the earliest full-length plays about AIDS. Two years later, JERKER challenged censorship and conventional attitudes toward gay sexuality, insisting that intimacy, desire, and love remain essential even in the face of death. Chesley died of AIDS-related complications in 1990 at age 47. This 40th-anniversary production honors both his artistic legacy and the generation whose lives he documented.
For this special 40th-anniversary production, Open Space Arts brings together Jason Bowen and Joshua Bowen, who are husbands in real life. Jason’s Chicago theater career includes founding Quest Theatre Ensemble, and his performance credits include the national tour of Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue. Joshua is an actor, producer, and entertainment attorney.
Their real-life relationship adds another dimension to Chesley’s exploration of intimacy and connection. And in a theater where just 25 audience members sit only a few feet from the performers, every laugh, hesitation, confession, and moment of tenderness becomes immediate and personal.
Forty years after its premiere, JERKER continues to challenge us. But it also offers something wonderfully simple: the chance to witness two people discovering that what began as sex has become love.
JERKER contains explicit sexual language, mature themes, and partial nudity. Recommended for adult audiences.
