Jerome
- Written by John J. Caswell, Jr.
- Directed by Dustin Wills
John is the writer of Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons), Scene Partners (Vineyard Theater), and Man Cave (Page 73 Productions). He is the recipient of the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, the Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Prize, and the Jean Kennedy Smith Playwriting Award. His work has been recognized by The Drama League, the Outer Critics Circle, the Relentless Award, and the Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards. He was a recent fellow at Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program after receiving an MFA from CUNY's Hunter College.
DUSTIN WILLS is a theatre and opera director based in New York City. Upcoming productions include Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin (Heartbeat Opera), Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro with Anthony Roth Costanzo (Little Island NYC), Jeremy O Harris’ A Boy’s Company Presents: Tell Me If I’m Hurting You, and some unannounced secret stuff (!!) Recent theatre: Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play (2023 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Direction and Production), John J. Caswell Jr.’s Wet Brain (Playwrights Horizons/MCC), Kate Tarker’s Montag (Soho Rep), and Awful Event! (Baryshnikov Arts Center Residency). Recent opera: Handel’s Alcina, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Stravinsky’s соловей. Dustin has devised new work with Teatro L’Arciliuto in Rome, Italy, created large-scale puppetry pageants with Creative Action, trained with Augusto Boal in Theatre of the Oppressed legislative performance, and for a couple of years gave rogue tours of the Vatican. He is a 2023 Obie Award winner, SDCF Callaway Award finalist, Princess Grace Award recipient, a Drama League alum, and Boris Sagal directing fellow. He teaches in the Directing and Playwriting programs at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale with a focus on new play development and directing for opera.
Jerome, a ghost town in the secluded Arizona backcountry, is home to Con and Doane, an aging gay couple who’ve built a quiet life far from the chaos of cities and other people—until a stranger arrives, fleeing his damaged past, and falls into their arms. Set at the height of the AIDS epidemic, John J. Caswell, Jr.’s new play is an unexpectedly funny, delicately wrought story of survival, even in the harshest of deserts.
John J. Caswell Jr.’s Wet Brain is a very funny, pitch-black comedy about addiction and obligation, love and abandonment, and patterns of poisonous behavior lodged so deep they seem encoded.
Wet Brain by playwright John J. Caswell Jr. is the kind of play that forces you to reckon with the singular nature of what theater can do.