Jerome at PH

[Fred Mason]

Jerome at PH#1

Posted: 5/25/26 at 12:35pm

Has anyone seen this play?  Running now through June 21st.  
 

Jerome, a ghost town in the secluded Arizona backcountry, is home to Con and Doane, an aging gay couple who’ve built a quiet life far from the chaos of cities and other people—until a stranger arrives, fleeing his damaged past, and falls into their arms. Set at the height of the AIDS epidemic, John J. Caswell, Jr.’s new play is an unexpectedly funny, delicately wrought story of survival, even in the harshest of deserts.

 

[raddersons]

Jerome at PH#2

Posted: 5/25/26 at 12:46pm

I will be seated at every Dustin Wills directed piece in New York. Friend told me it’s beautiful. Going in a few weeks. 

[quizking101]

Jerome at PH#3

Posted: 5/25/26 at 12:57pm

I saw it on Saturday night and it was pretty damn good.

There is definitely lot to digest. It’s like a dark domestic comedy that’s teetering on going full tilt surrealism at any given point - until it finally does. At the same time, it also has a surprisingly tender approach to non-traditional relationships - in this case, a triad with two older men and one younger man.

Stephen Spinella is fantastic in this and is both caustic and heartbreaking. It almost feels like a spiritual successor to Prior Walter. I was surprised to see that there is a new actor playing his husband (Jeorge Bennett Watson) and apparently there wasn’t much time to prepare, but I totally found their relationship to be very believable and lived in within the context of the story. I’m sure it will only get stronger.

To that end, Playwrights is really on a roll lately with this very ambitious plays, and I gotta give credit to the set designers for this show in using the stage and space to create things I didn’t even know were possible off-Broadway. 

Check out my eBay page for sales on Playbills!! www.ebay.com/usr/missvirginiahamm

[Kad]

Jerome at PH#4

Posted: 5/25/26 at 1:06pm

I saw it on Thurs and it did not yet seem fully ready for audiences. Two instances of line being called and a general sense of tentativeness and dropped cues in the second act. 
 

The play itself was a miss for me. Despite a promising premise- an older committed gay couple in rural Arizona in the early 90s takes a third- it does surprisingly little with it. The setting is not explored at all and the time period is utilized only to address AIDS in a hamfisted way. The play takes place over several years in time jumps, and those time jumps are mostly used to fast forward to relationship conflicts, so we never see this throuple as a functioning relationship. Their third (Ken Barnett, somehow making this role work) is haunted and damaged by trauma that is so immediately obvious, yet the revelation of it is teased out until the last third of the play. What we get are repetitious scenes of a damaged man driving a wedge into a relationship, while Spinella’s character frets about his health problems and mortality for several years and essentially rehashes the Prior/Louis conflict from Angels while apparently making the argument that the best reason to be in a throuple is to have a spare partner. The play’s ending rang so false and sappy and out of step with the rest of the piece to me that I left rather annoyed about it. 
 

So while things will tighten up- and they need to at 2.5 hours- and I’m sure revisions will be made, I’m just not sure it’ll be something I can really recommend. 

"...everyone finally shut up, and the audience could enjoy the beginning of the Anatevka Pogram in peace."