Jerker, by Robert Chesley

Chicago
Minneapolis
Philadelphia
Brooklyn
669-275-1807

Artists Maxe Crandall and Emmett Ramstad present a free live phone reading of Robert Chesley’s 1985 play Jerker, or The Helping Hand: A Pornographic Elegy with Redeeming Social Value and a Hymn to the Queer Men of San Francisco in Twenty Phone Calls, Many of Them Dirty. Jerker tells the story of two strangers who develop an erotic fraternal relationship through phone sex. As the two characters get each other off, they demonstrate the power of sexual fantasy in processing the grief, rage, and loneliness of living in pandemic.


Inspired by their obsession with Robert Chesley’s archive at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco, this live phone reading concludes a performance research tour at archives and queer/trans spaces about “corresponding intimacies,” a term used to describe deep bonds people create through experimental relations.

2022 Summer Tour
sponsored by a Eureka Commission from Onassis USA courtesy of Broadway Play Publishing Inc and Victor Bumbalo of the Robert Chesley/Victor Bumbalo Foundation
June w/ Charles Ryan Long | Leather Archives & Museum | Chicago IL
          w/ Chandler Daily | Quatrefoil Library | Minneapolis MN
          w/ Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad | William Way Center | Philadelphia PA
          w/ Stephen Ira & Aldrin Valdez | Montrose Ave | Brooklyn NY
          w/ Constantine Zavitsanos | 669-275-1807 | The World





Flyer by Emmett Ramstad




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Beautiful Moments in Popular Culture is a theater company based in Oakland. Our mission is to produce performance at odds with commercial theater and to make occasion for underproduced or forgotten theater. Before the pandemic we ran a performance series at The Stud in San Francisco, and soon we will open a venue in the air.
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Plays for Every Occasion  performance series and book project theorizing Occasional Theater