John J. Caswell’s new drama “Jerome,” opening this week at Playwrights Horizons, appears to take place in a hole in the ground. Two 60-something men, Con (Stephen Spinella) and Doane (Jeorge Bennett Watson), do live there — at one point, Con says they bought their house for its one basalt wall, a slab of living rock anchoring the whole structure. Yet, sitting in the theater, the audience can see that the loving couple’s living room is a pit, with coal-black magma covering every surface. You understand: The director and set designer Dustin Wills has replaced their home with a metaphor.
The Jerome of Caswell’s title refers to a real, quasi-deserted Arizona copper mining town, so the igneous setting could represent an abandoned mine. The floor grumbles, as if the earth is shifting underneath it, and we occasionally hear the far-off sounds of miners’ pickaxes. (Leah Gelpe did the sound design, which can be both atmospheric and devilishly hard to hear.) But Caswell’s underdeveloped script rather quickly loses interest in Arizonan particularities, and moves instead toward a generalized sense of grief. This “Jerome” — a triangular romance set in the early 1990s — is really speaking to us from a crater, the smoking psychic caldera left by AIDS.
Out on their Southwestern mountain, in 1992, Con and Doane don’t think too much about the plague. They’ve been monogamous for almost 30 years, in love since meeting in the army. After some early homophobic stickiness with the neighbors in the ’60s, they’re now left in a peaceful quasi-solitude, complicated only by Con’s battles with his bad kidneys and weak heart.
At a Halloween party, Con (dressed as a bear) tells Doane (dressed as Nina Simone) that they need to add variety to their relationship. Con’s sense of his own approaching death impels him to invite a person into their marriage, and he selects a muscular He-Man at the party, Bruin (Ken Barnett), a transplant from San Francisco. The best and funniest scene in “Jerome” is the trio’s first hookup, which we overhear through a bedroom door. “I’d rather do just one thing at a time, if that’s all right,” says Con.
The problem with a metaphorical pit as your set is that the ambience can’t change. Spinella and Watson must convey that they have a beautiful life that a San Francisco escapee would be delighted to join, yet Wills has made their existence look like a prison. Their rock living room is basically a cell; a mid-show nightmare sequence is as dark as the daytime scenes. And while Jerome itself may represent liberation — in the program, Caswell describes the eccentric ghost town as a refuge — he hasn’t put much detail about the landscape into the play, nor has Wills into the production.
Time hops forward, so that we can see how the three-pointed relationship is going. Honestly, it’s not great, even though the characters keep insisting — in the absence of second-act chemistry — that they adore one another. Bruin drinks, and he won’t talk truthfully about his past. (Never trust a man you meet costumed as a Master of the Universe.) We sense early on that Bruin has abandoned someone sick in San Francisco. AIDS is a centrifugal force in “Jerome,” present mostly as a traumatizing tornado, one that might leave a man too unsteady to build anything new.
Plot-wise, the question is: Can this new family survive in the face of so much death? But despite often repetitive conversations among the men, we rarely have enough information to invest in the answer. Caswell has trouble pacing his information delivery, so all Bruin’s motivations get crammed into a bewildering late-play speech. Doane, obsessed with his and Con’s homegrown traditions, is unfailingly stalwart, but otherwise a cipher.
Unsurprisingly, the play’s finest creation is the complexly drawn Con. Spinella’s own gracefulness as a performer, wry and abruptly stormy, may remind theatergoers of his most famous role: Prior Walter, in the original production of “Angels in America.” Here, as there, he’s playing a character whose lover is afraid to care for him as his body fails. (In the intervening years, the theater has gotten more comfortable with talking about gay coupledom; there is more frank talk about sex in two acts of “Jerome” than in both evenings of “Angels.”)
Terrified that Doane will be alone when he dies, Con sometimes behaves like a Machiavelli rather than a husband, manipulating Doane and Bruin, men whom he should treat as partners. It’s a fascinating dynamic, simultaneously sincerely loving and derived from Con’s need for control. Is this a good place for Bruin? Should the three of them try to stay together? The ménage shifts in the dim light, as Caswell starts to bend his story line toward unlikely resolutions. And underneath his plot, illness is forging Con’s character in profound ways we cannot fully perceive. We glimpse something shining in Con; Spinella makes sure we do. It’s intriguingly hard to know, though, if he’s showing his lovers real gold or false.
Jerome Through June 21 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
Helen Shaw is the chief theater critic for The Times.
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