Jerome ★★★★

For theatergoers of a certain age, Jerome at Playwrights Horizons can feel uncanny at times. There is the always-terrific Stephen Spinella playing Con, a scared-but-determined gay man who’s sick with an incurable illness over the course of several years, starting in 1992. In mannerisms, demeanor, and ripostes, Con resembles an older version of Prior Walter, the role Spinella originated in the 1993 Broadway premiere of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

But unlike Prior, Con does not have AIDS. And in a move by playwright John J. Caswell, Jr. that’s more fitting of Roy Cohn than Prior, AIDS is never mentioned in Jerome. Even so, it hangs in this play’s air every moment, a spectre looming over the three gay men who attempt a throuple in the ghost town of Jerome, Arizona.

Jerome begins at the town’s annual Halloween ball, where Con and his partner Doane (Jeorge Bennett Watson, commanding) suss out the scene for a playmate to spice up their “milquetoast” sex lives.

DOANE: Don’t you think he looks a little young?

CON: What is age when you’re defending the realm of Eternia? You should go say hello.

DOANE: I am a little curious to see if his PowerSword makes all the different battle sounds.

CON: Ask him to push his buttons, then invite him over to our place for tiramisu but say tiramisu like a double-entendre.

The He-Man being pursued is Bruin (Ken Barnett, suitably enigmatic), the hunky and rather private new man in town, recently relocated from San Francisco. Ten years younger than Con and Doane, Bruin makes his interest in the couple clear, and the three get intimate offstage in an overlong sex scene that is heard but not seen.

Fast forward a year, and the three are now living together, though the anxiety-ridden Bruin continues to reveal little of his haunted past, a trait that drives Con crazy, especially since Bruin drinks to manage his emotions, and Con, anticipating his death, wants Bruin to remain after he’s gone, to care for Doane when he no longer can.

Director Dustin Wills is also the show’s set designer, and he and Caswell, Jr. collaborated on their last outing at Playwrights Horizons, the fascinatingly bizarre and moving Wet Brain. They make for a dynamic pairing. Wills, who also directs opera, likes to match heightened theatricality to heightened emotional states. Fittingly, the first act of Jerome ends with a coup de théâtre as Bruin, unable to face his past, falls deeper and deeper into despair.

It’s a grand moment, a burst of buzzy theatricality that the play never quite reaches again, though the trio’s Thanksgiving fishing trip in the second act comes close. As much as the production’s spectacle heightens the drama, the script never reaches that same level of tension.

But perhaps that’s the point. Caswell, Jr. has written an AIDS play that never mentions the disease, preferring to let the unspoken quietly hang in the balance, a reminder — or lesson — for younger generations who’ve never known the horror and fear that gay men experienced during the worst of that epidemic. Those unfamiliar with that nightmarish time may not know any of the many who died, but their spirits remain among us, watching to see what the living do with the world they left behind.