Jerome (3*)

There's a lot to enjoy if you can get past the central premise of Jerome:  an isolated gay couple who met during the Korean War, become a throuple for more than just sex at the height of the AIDS epidemic.  The performances are terrific, the jokes are funny and the sentiments are sweet, if fantastic.  But from my own emotionally wrenching experience, sexual jealousy, not fear of death, seems like the gravest impediment to a relationship outside the heteronormative sphere of things.

In commentary about the show distributed on site, Playwright's Horizons artistic director Adam Greenfield writes "For years [AIDS] felt like an untouchable subject, out of respect for our elders: what right had we to discuss a trauma that we didn't personally live through?"  As one of those elders who survived and saw all the first-wave plays I would respond: "every right, so long as you bring something new to the table."  Playwright John J. Caswell, Jr., doesn't; he and director Dustin Willis rely on melodrama and mechanics to explain away the bad behavior of the hunky but mostly blank younger man in the relationship, something that Tony Kushner did with so much more nuanced angst in Angels in America.

It's a shame.  Because Caswell does explore an issue--end-of-life discussion and behavior--that doesn't require his exhumation of the past although I didn't buy for a second the selflessness of the saintly Con (Stephen Spinella, just as affecting as he was in his dual Tony-winning Angels performances).  His body has been ravaged not by AIDS, but drinking and time.  He's determined to find his own replacement for Doane (Jeorge Bennett Watson), his stoic lover whose color Caswell never addresses (perhaps this "elder" is too literal for race-blind casting, but I kept thinking the dynamics of an interracial, gay couple who moved to an Arizona ghost town in the early 70s would have been much more fertile territory to mine).

The HIV epidemic decimated the men of my generation, including David, my only long term relationship.    His loss was certainly traumatizing even though we were only friends when he died in early 1993 at the age of 39. I remember people saying then that because of AIDS, they knew what it must feel like to be old and to lose your friends, inexorably, one by one.

Well, here I am, more than three decades later, about to go through it all over again, this time facing the certainty of my own mortality and that of my fellow survivors.  Caswell missed an opportunity to put that in his pipe and smoke it, settling instead for unnecessary metaphorical exploitation of a health crisis and saccharine declarations of love based primarily on sexual attraction.

No doubt his response would be "OK Boomer."  He wouldn't be entirely wrong, either.  Those who can, create; those who can't, criticize.