Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, Stephen Spinella, Ken Barnett to Star in Jerome at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons has cast its upcoming production of John J. Caswell, Jr.'s Jerome, set to play the Off-Broadway company's Judith O. Rubin Theater May 14-June 21. Opening night will be June 2. Dustin Wills is directing.

The three-hander will star two-time Tony winner Stephen Spinella (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) as Con, Tyrone Mitchell Henderson (The Skin of Our Teeth) as Doane, and Ken Barnett (Wonderful Town) as Bruin. Casting is by Alldaffer & Donadio Casting.

The play centers on aging gay couple Con and Doane, living in a secluded ghost town in Arizona when a stranger arrives at the height of the AIDS epidemic and forces them to re-think their relationship arrangement.

The production will feature scenic design by Wills, costume design by Rodrigo Muñoz, lighting design by Barbara Samuels, sound design by Leah Gelpe, and props by Matt Carlin. Kasson Marroquin will serve as production stage manager, with Tyler Crow as assistant stage manager.

“My great-grandmother lived in Camp Verde, 30 miles southeast of Jerome, which in the '90s was a tourist ghost town. My family and I would always go on road trips around neighboring towns when we visited her, so it was always tied to an older generation that introduced me to this place," says Caswell, Jr. in a statement. "There was a compelling queerness to the place: people go here to visit vortexes and absorb the energy of the earth; people hawk crystals; you could pick a medium off a menu on the wall of a shop. The land looked like Mars. It was a place where my own self-consciousness about my queerness went away because everything else around me was so grandly strange. In Jerome, around when I was eight, I saw two men sitting on a bench, who I believe the characters in the play are loosely gleaned from, sitting close to each other in a way that was so familiar but that I had never seen before. And in all places in Yavapai County, which is blood-red conservative. As a kid I recognized something in that image and it stuck with me.

"I have a lot of residual trauma having grown up in the '80s and '90s as a closeted gay kid in rural Arizona and watching news of people dying. People that I imagined as similar to myself or who I would become. There’s a generation of elder-millennial gay people who have, because of this, inherited a much more paranoid, heteronormative version of homosexuality in which we pursued things like marriage equality more fervently than our own mental and sexual liberation. This play—about how illness and decline and the desire to take the best care of those we love creates a throuple of necessity—is me writing from that divide between the fear I grew up and lived much of my life with, and freedom."

Caswell, Jr. returns to Playwrights with Jerome after his Wet Brain premiered there in 2023, also directed by Wills.

"As an audience member, I like to be in a world where I don’t know if I’m trusting what I’m witnessing. I think of John’s plays as works where the real and imagined are coexisting on top of each other; very real human beings are in relief against an uncanny world," adds Wills. "The vibration between those things is an exciting place for me. Theatrical magic and surprise stir up things in the audience—and give them the responsibility to tease out what they think is real."

Visit PlaywrightsHorizons.org.