Drawing more out of `Jerker'

By 1996, when Kearns directed a 10th anniversary production of the play at Highways and later in San Francisco, he was the sole survivor of the original creative team -- actors Stebbins and Joe Fraser as well as Chesley had died from AIDS complications. "Those two productions bookend so much pain and hope, sorrow and joy," he says. "Life, like the play, seems to get more intense."

The 20th anniversary production of "Jerker" coincides with the release by Broadway Play Publishing of "Plays by Robert Chesley." Chesley, who died at age 47 in 1990, was a composer, theater critic and playwright, whose 1984 drama "Night Sweat" is widely considered the first full-length play about AIDS. Known for the intensity and poeticism of his writing as well as its unapologetic treatment of gay themes and issues, Chesley wrote nine other full-length plays and 21 one-acts, including "Jerker."

Those who have long admired the late writer's work hope for a newfound recognition.

Mark Thompson, for example, was a writer for and cultural affairs editor and senior editor of the national gay newsmagazine the Advocate from 1975 to 1994. Living in San Francisco during the early '80s, as did Chesley, he saw many of the era's most politically charged plays.

"Robert Chesley was one of the most significant gay playwrights of his time," says Thompson, who has written five books on gay history and culture. " 'Jerker' remains to this day one of the most important pieces of gay theater ever created."

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Raunch yields to tragedy

THE story of "Jerker" unfolds in a series of 20 phone calls -- some of which include phone sex -- between a Vietnam vet named J.R. (Gill) and another man known only as Bert (Howell). Over the course of these calls, the relationship expands into friendship and love.

Reviewing the 1988 production, then-Times critic Dan Sullivan wrote: "I've never seen a play that went from the near-pornographic to the tragic, but 'Jerker' achieves it."

"It is in-your-face and raunchy, and of course we get titillated by that," says Howell. "But then it turns around and punches you in the stomach with its depth and sensitivity and the love between the two characters."

A key to the work's durability may be its artful use of language. "In some respects, the title may be the most important words the playwright composes," says Kearns, himself the author of numerous solo shows, plays and books. "What does 'Jerker' mean? Well, it certainly carries the sexual connotation of masturbation. But it is also, quite deliberately, a tear-jerker. That is what is so compelling about the play and remains so: It is outrageously sexual but just as outrageously romantic, even sentimental."