Jerker at Waterloo East Theatre: Two Voices, One Phone Line and an Intimacy That Takes Your Breath Away
Jerker, written by Robert Chesley and directed by Henry Adams, is the kind of production that reminds you why intimate studio theatre, stripped of spectacle, reduced to its absolute essentials, can achieve something that no larger stage could replicate. Produced by Adam Roebuck, the same producer behind F**king Men, Afterglow (2019) and Happy Ending, and making its highly anticipated Waterloo East Theatre premiere this autumn, forty years after its acclaimed San Francisco debut, this is a bold, seductive and unexpectedly tender two-hander that arrives with both its reputation and its relevance fully intact. In ninety interval-free minutes, it asks what intimacy really means, what vulnerability costs, and whether two people can truly know each other when they have never once been in the same room.
The premise is deceptively simple. JR and Bert are two strangers who connect through a series of late-night phone calls. What begins as anonymous fantasy quickly sparks into something deeper. The production establishes this world with a confidence that never falters. From the very first call, the careful negotiation of two people feeling out the boundaries of a connection they have not yet named, the play demonstrates a precise and sophisticated understanding of how intimacy operates when it is freed from the pressure of physical presence. A pause before a question is answered, a laugh that arrives a beat too late, a moment where the fantasy and the real person behind it press briefly against each other and from here, Jerker has you completely.
What works especially well is the architecture of Chesley's writing. Hidden from each other's sight, the men reveal secrets, fears and longings through nothing but their voices, and each call pulls them further into an intimate world where imagination becomes a lifeline, where the line between fantasy and genuine connection begins to blur, raising the question of who they really are to one another. The dialogue moves between playfulness and provocation, between desire and genuine emotional exposure, with a fluency that reflects a playwright who understood that erotic language and emotional language are not opposites but extensions of each other. The script trusts its audience to hold both registers simultaneously, which is one of the more demanding and rewarding things a play can ask.
Paul Dennison as JR and James Lee as Bert carry the entire production between them with a shared commitment that is remarkable to witness. The challenge of the two-hander format, particularly one in which the two characters never physically occupy the same space, is that everything depends on the reality of the relationship being felt even across that distance, and both performers meet that challenge with genuine skill. Small vocal details do the work that gesture and proximity cannot: a shift in tone that signals something is being withheld, a moment where the performance of ease drops and something more exposed surfaces briefly before being covered again, a laugh that is also, unmistakably, a form of tenderness. The relationship between JR and Bert feels fully inhabited and real, and it is precisely because it feels real that everything it becomes carries the weight it does.
Henry Adams's direction keeps the production clean and purposeful, understanding that the play's power lies in what it withholds as much as in what it reveals. Jonathan Simpson's lighting design and Adams and Scott Michaels's sound design give the production a textural depth that supports the storytelling without ever working against the essential intimacy of the material. Waterloo East's space, compact and close, is exactly the right environment for a play that depends on the audience feeling genuinely present, not watching from a safe distance but drawn into the world of the calls alongside its protagonists.
One of Jerker's greatest strengths is the way it holds its more provocative material in genuine dramatic tension with its emotional depth. By turns playful, provocative and unexpectedly tender, the play explores how intimacy can grow in isolation: a steamy, suspenseful journey into desire, vulnerability and the power of being heard. The comedy in the earlier calls, the negotiation, the performance, the occasional absurdity of fantasy gives the play a foundation of warmth that makes the quieter, more searching later passages land with real force. Nothing is inserted for effect; everything grows from the situation and from the characters within it.
There are moments where the production slows and allows something more fragile to surface, where the calls become less about desire and more about two people finding, perhaps for the first time, someone willing to truly listen. These are among the ninety minutes' most affecting passages. Adams's direction understands that what makes Chesley's play endure four decades after its premiere is not its provocations but its compassion, its insistence that the need to be known, to be heard, to matter to another person, is as fundamental as any other human drive, and that the forms it takes are never as simple as they first appear.
