Jerker begins screening online as the latest virtual offering of Out Front Theatre in Atlanta, it might be easy to reduce it to a titillating play about two gay men talking dirty to one another.
That would be a mistake. This playful, candidly sexual, and ultimately searing piece of theater is so much more than a phone sex gimmick.Jerker transports us to the 1980s (the play was written in 1986 by the late Robert Chesley) when gay sex had become so terrifyingly dangerous that the bars emptied and sex venues closed.
There were no online apps (“online,” as a concept, was still in its infancy), and any sexual prospects carried with them an unnerving amount of anxiety.But that doesn’t mean our collective libido as gay men disappeared altogether..