Book Launch + Performance of Jerker
London Performance Studios is excited to host the launch of The AIDS Plays Project: Queer Plays from Trailblazing Writers Lost to HIV/AIDS, a new publication from Methuen Drama edited and introduced by Alastair Curtis, founder of The AIDS Plays Project. The release marked with a one-night-only rehearsed reading of Jerker (or The Helping Hand) by Robert Chesley.
The publication includes all of the plays that The AIDS Plays Project has staged at LPS between 2023 and 2025, written by seven queer playwrights lost to HIV/AIDS whose work has all but vanished from the contemporary stage: Charles Ludlam, James Kirkwood Jr., George Whitmore, Harry Kondoleon, Alan Bowne, Colm Ó Clúbhán, and Robert Chesley.
Alongside these scripts, it features interviews, biographies, photographs, and new writing by Amelia Abraham, Sam Moore, Lauren J. Joseph, Marcelo Dos Santos, Jack Holden, James Ijames, Charlie Josephine, Margaret Perry, Jordan Tannahill, and Michael Bronski, whose essays invite a new generation to rediscover and reinterpret these neglected queer works
The book launch honours the work of trailblazing San Franciscan playwright, critic, and gay rights activist Robert Chesley by reviving Jerker (or The Helping Hand), last seen at LPS in 2024. He used his theatre to celebrate sexual liberation and dramatise the toll of HIV/AIDS on the queer community. Jerker, written forty years ago, is his masterpiece.
Jerker
JR and BERT are San Francisco f*ggots. They have never met. They don’t know each other’s names, what they look like or where they live. They do know how to turn each other on.
Jerker begins with a dirty phone call. But, over the many nights that follow, as their friends and lovers fall sick and die, the men come to share their fantasies, hopes and fears about an increasingly uncertain and frightening future.
Dates and Times
Thu 3 December / Doors 7:30 PM / Performance 8 PM
Tickets
Tickets will go on sale in October
Location
Studio 1, London Performance Studios
Entry via Ormside Street
For more info on how to get to London Performance Studios, click here
03/12
About
Alastair Curtis (he/him) is a writer, director and founder of The AIDS Plays Project. His writing has been published in Frieze, AnOther, The Economist, Prospect, and The Observer. Sweetheart, his debut short film, premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2025.
Curtis founded The AIDS Plays Project in 2023 to re-stage and re-publish the theatrical works of queer writers whose lives were cut short due to HIV/AIDS-related illnesses. He directed all seven plays staged at LPS by The AIDS Plays Project at LPS as part of the Associate Artist Programme.
The AIDS Plays Project is a theatre company dedicated to reviving, archiving and republishing the work of queer playwrights whose careers and lives were cut short by HIV/ AIDS. Striving for cultural recovery and repair, it seeks to reconnect contemporary audiences and young queer artists with a lost generation of playwrights.
“A loving act of preservation that doubles as a radical act of rediscovery. By staging queer work that has unfairly slipped into obscurity—and in some cases, never been performed before—Curtis creates an ongoing dialogue between today’s LGBTQ+ community and an earlier generation that was decimated by HIV/AIDS.”
— AnOther
“An impressive act of queer archaeology giving new life to shows written by playwrights who died of AIDS. Over the last two years, this patient DIY project has begun to expand the queer theatrical canon, re-staging stories from a lost generation with regular seasons of rehearsed readings.”
— Exeunt