A sign in front of the curtain at John J. Caswell Jr.’s new drama Jerome informs us that the title is not the protagonist of the show — or even a secondary character — but a “ghost city” with a population of less than 1,000. (In fact, the former copper-mining outpost about 50 miles southwest of Flagstaff, Arizona, has less than 500 residents — a number that hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years.) The time is the early 1990s, the height of the AIDS crisis, and we meet a longtime gay couple who met while serving together in the Korean War and settled in this remote desert locale 20-odd years ago.
Doane (George Bennett Watson) is a no-nonsense type, and a tour guide in a town that seems to exist solely for the occasional tourist. (“In Jerome our story was industry. Now our industry is story.”) His partner, Con, short for Cornelius (Stephen Spinella), is the tart-tongued queen of the couple, with a fondness for sassy one-liners and holiday decorations in the 19th-century house they occupy that was built by a psychic medium and her wife with a cliff-face as one of the walls. Con is also suffering from advanced kidney disease after a lifetime of heavy drinking. So naturally, he happens on the idea of enlivening their decades-long relationship with a third — who arrives in the form of a younger, fitter ex-Mormon named Bruin (Ken Barnett) who’s fled San Francisco for reasons he’s reluctant to disclose (but easily guessed since it’s 1992 and he’s a gay man from San Francisco).
An ominous shadow of mortality hangs over much of Jerome, which perhaps explains why so much of director Dustin Wills’ set is cast in darkness (by Barbara Samuels) for much of its running time. As in Caswell and Wills’ memorable 2023 collaboration Wet Brain, there’s an interesting tension between naturalism and the show’s more fantastical elements — including an extended nightmare sequence that opens the second act that’s tonally jarring compared to the rest of the show. Both also feature coup de theatre surprises where the set gives way, literally, to turn the metaphoric into the literal — again for no reason that makes sense for this particular show.
Impressive stagecraft can’t make up for an unconvincing story or characters who seem unlikely to be friends, let alone passionate lovers. It doesn’t help that Barnett appears to be decades younger than the fiftysomething we eventually learn that he is — but we never really buy that he’s chosen this couple as anything but a way station as he hides out from the fraught life he left behind in the Bay Area.
There are some funny lines scattered throughout, mostly delivered by Spinella with a puckish twist. (When Bruin objects to watching Murder She Wrote because he hates Angela Lansbury, Spinella’s Con responds in not-entirely-deadpan horror, “What a horrible thing to say.”) But the show never settles on a central theme or storyline. Instead, Caswell posits a whole collection of nascent ideas, like the many artificial Christmas trees strewn about Doane and Con’s living room. There’s the sex life of gay men in their 60s, the pitfalls of being in a throuple, the impulse to run away from your problems and drown yourself in alcohol in a remote new location, even the noble idea of a dying man lining up a replacement for his partner. But Jerome never settles on any of these narrative nuggets for long enough to say something interesting or new.
While the show opens with Con and Doane, dressed up for at an improbably lively (and safe) gay Halloween party in 1990s northern Arizona, it’s Barnett’s Bruin who undergoes the biggest changes — even if the secrets that he’s hiding from his new lovers are pretty easily guessed. Too often, Jerome plays like the overlong first draft of a promising dramedy that hasn’t yet found its voice. ★★☆☆☆
JEROME
Playwrights Horizons, Off Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through June 21 for $64 to $104