Phillyist Reviews... Love Jerry

Love Jerry is a family drama. It is about relationships within a family—in this case, two brothers—and what happens when a member of that family does something reprehensible. The play's title isn't a mandate; it's a question. Can you still love someone who so wholly betrayed you? Is blood thicker than water? The offender in any crime is someone's son or daughter, brother or sister, husband or wife, niece, nephew, uncle, or aunt. There are people who loved the perpetrator before the crime, and people who will continue to love him after. How many inmates convicted of horrible crimes still receive visits from their mothers, care packages from their sisters? Criminals, like it or not, are people, too. But with some crimes, pedophilia perhaps being the foremost, it is easy to forget that.

Love Jerry challenges the audience to remember. Jerry (Boulware) is not a hero, by any means. But he's human, which perhaps makes the violation he perpetrates—the molestation of his young nephew—more difficult to swallow. This is not some nameless, faceless stranger performing unspeakable acts. How much easier it is to condemn the anonymous.

There is no trick being played on the audience here. We are not led to like Jerry only to be betrayed by him. Even without the controversial promotional materials, we would be able to tell pretty early on that something with Jerry was amiss. Jerry sits squarely on the line between charming and creepy, but we know, especially with the assistance of some brilliantly scripted scenes with an internet predator (Blatt), that it's the darker side that will win in the end. Jerry is a man with many demons, himself abused as a child and struggling against forces far larger than he. That does not mean that we can forgive, or even understand, Jerry.

Whether we can love him, though? The play doesn't tell us what to do. On the one hand, we have Jerry's brother Mike (McLenigan), whose bond with Jerry is shaken but ultimately too deep to ignore. On the other, Mike's wife, Kate (the always excellent Joffred) cannot see anything but the violation perpetrated against her son.

These issues are complex and powerful and addressed with an impressive air of neutrality—not toward pedophilia, which everyone in the play (with the exception of Blatt's character, Clowny) condemns, but toward the rush of confusing emotions that ensue from any traumatic experience. Love Jerry doesn't condone pedophilia. It doesn't brush it to the side. It is, in fact, an indictment of the act in no uncertain terms. But it presents us with the very real idea that sometimes people hate the sin and love the sinner.

And sometimes, they don't.

Nice People Theatre Company's Love Jerry (written by Megan Gogerty; directed by Rebecca Wright) continues at the Latvian Society at 7th and Spring Garden through June 20. Information and tickets online.