Jerker
This play is available below and is also included in the collection:
Play Description
In JERKER, alternatively titled “The Helping Hand, A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and A Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Telephone Calls, Many of them Dirty,” J.R. and Bert’s anonymous telephone-sex relationship continues to evolve into something deeper until Bert’s health begins to fail.
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (2 male)Full Length Drama (about 70 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“… although Robert Chesley’s JERKER does indeed center around two naked men whacking off while exchanging fantasies on the phone (well, to tell the truth only one bares all), it is finally a funny, thoughtful, tender story that emerges … the most wonderful thing about JERKER is its sense of humor. Some performance artists have been known to do appalling things to their genitalia for no apparent artistic reason, but this playwright is not out simply to shock. And because Chesley peppers his scenes with gentle wit and good-natured joking, he eases our potential embarrassment at the play’s action.” —Diana Spinrad, Chicago Reader
“These strange, wonderful, heartbreaking plays go beyond magic realism into something very deep and primal. No matter where he began, in fairy tale or phone sex, Robert Chesley always took his audience someplace new. He could shift from the silly to the dangerous to the tender in the blink of an eye. His plays are not period pieces, but startling glimpses of a recent past that tell us things we badly need to know about our present and future.” —Christopher Bram
“Without question, Robert Chesley is the most incisive gay playwright at work in America today.” —Mark Thompson, The Advocate
“Robert Chesley wrote gut-wrenching plays.” —Linda Winer, Newsday
Author(s)
Robert ChesleyPlaywright, Composer, Author, Activist. B.A. in Music, Reed College, Portland, Oregon. Robert Chesley is best remembered as a playwright, though he was also an author, critic, and composer. He was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and taught in private schools in upstate New York for nearly ten years before settling in New York City in 1976. He relocated to San Francisco in the early 1980s where he became a part of the gay theater scene. Chesley composed during the ten-year period 1965 to 1975 and his compositions were almost exclusively for voice. Between 1966 and 1970 he composed 53 songs, mostly to texts by American poets including Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, and James Agee, and including sixteen settings of the British poet Walter de la Mare. There are also several choral works from the 1970s, with texts by Gertrude Stein and Walt Whitman among others. His few instrumental works include the score to a 1972 film by Erich Kollmar, the "Sonata for Guitar and Harpsichord" (1974), and the "Little Concerto for Two Flutes and String Orchestra" (1968), which was revived in 1991 in a Benson Series concert of Downtown Music Productions, conducted by Mimi Stern-Wolfe. The transformation of Robert Chesley, composer, to Robert Chesley, playwright, roughly coincided with his move to San Francisco. In 1984 the city's Theatre Rhinoceros produced his first one act, HELL, I LOVE YOU and in 1984 Chesley's NIGHT SWEAT became the first produced full-length play to deal with AIDS. In all, Chesley wrote ten full-length and twenty-one one-act plays. Several works were premiered posthumously, and all of his major plays have been published. Robert Chesley died of AIDS in San Francisco at the age of 47 on December 5, 1990.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 10/1/2005 |
| Pages | 120 |
| ISBN | 9780881452679 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Professional
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Two women find that they have everything in common until the death of a brother drives them apart. Part stand-up comedy, part stand-up tragedy for two. The redhaired mythology that glorifies and empowers two women leads them into a big love, but can’t lead them safely out again. A play about the heaviness of the things we carry.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
What would happen if you found that impossible love was indeed possible? And what would happen if two of these couples were a drag queen and a woman, and a priest and a boy?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (1 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$50.00
Play Description
Who do you step on to get to the top? A young Nuyorican beat maker calls out a rising pop star for ripping off his track. ORIGINAL SOUND is a fierce, funny, musical journey through the heart of an unforgiving industry.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male, one nonbinary character)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Arrogant young Puerto Rican Fatima, who works as a counter girl at a fast-food restaurant, has been arrested for the murder of 14 people, poisoned at her workplace. Young attorney Jeremy has been assigned to defend her and asks a Latina colleague, Maritza, to be his translator. But Fatima refuses to talk to anyone but Maritza, and she's enough of a manipulator to get her way. Fatima claims she has been blessed — or cursed — with psychic powers. By merely clasping the hand of an individual, she says, she can immediately grasp everything about him/her including past, future, and innermost secrets. She tells Maritza that her murders were mercy killings: She “read” each of her victims and killed them because they wanted to die. Maritza is first incredulous, then indignant at Fatima's playing God. She firmly resists letting Fatima clasp her hand, but Fatima is persuasive, constantly shifting from pugnacious, foul-mouthed street girl to wise and wily seductress to gentle, compassionate young woman. Maritza finally offers up her hand, yielding her secrets and placing her fate in Fatima's grasp.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Trapped in horrendous and cramped living conditions with his father and grandfather, Rosario Cortez battles to break his family's cycle of poverty and remove his son from the violence and squalor of the urban ghetto.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (1 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
When Trent brings Felix home to New Orleans to meet his father and homophobic grandfather, the family’s demons come slithering into the light. Watchful ghosts, sinister hustlers, and a myriad of parasites lead Felix on a Southern Gothic journey to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (4 male)Full Length Drama (about 105 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A satirical piece which turns its sharp eye on political correctness, office politics, sexual harassment, religious persuasions, and societal and cultural norms. The actors don’t know which role they’ll play until the audience decides for them at each performance. The actors forge their own unique interpretations in any one of the 40,320 possible casting combinations that could confront them, creating a unique and hilarious interpretation of the show every night.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male, Flexible Casting)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Eric Bentley’s gay adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s LA RONDE set in 1970’s New York.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (8 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
The true story of two actors who hired themselves out to the Long Beach Police Department in 1914 to entrap “social vagrants” in public restrooms. Thirty-one men were arrested, and the ensuing scandal led to an ordinance against “oral sodomy” in California.
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
Play Description
A trilogy of interconnected one-act plays, whose subject matter is the AIDS epidemic. In (WILD) PERSON, TENSE (DOG) Dog and Buck, former lovers, run into each other at a bar. Both now have AIDS. Buck’s disease is in the advanced stages, and Dog refuses to recognize and acknowledge their shared past and, inevitably, their shared future. In THE DEPLORATION OF ROVER Fido is angry that Rover, in spite of being sick, continues to act on his desires. And in HOLD Dog reminisces with Lad, his lover, as he undresses him, but Lad, who has died of AIDS, exists now only in Dog’s imagination.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (5 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A comedy with songs about students falling in and out of love.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes