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Can't Miss It, Weekend Edition: Nov 6-8
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Dennis Cooper & Gisèle Vienne's Jerk opens tonight at 8 p.m. at On the Boards and runs through Sunday. Tickets are nearly sold out; call the box office at 206-217-9888 to see if they can get you in.
As Seattle nurses its joyous hang-over from last night, it's hard to recommend heading down to On the Boards tonight for what's probably the darkest show you'll see on Seattle stages this year. The latest collaboration of American novelist Dennis Cooper and French puppeteer and director Gisèle Vienne, Jerk is a dark, disturbing, and obscene work that explores the darkest facets of human nature in the most disturbing manner possible.
It's based on the infamous "Houston Mass Murders" of the 1970s, carried out by Dean Corll, a candy store owner, who employed two teenage boys, David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, to acquire him other teenage boys as rape-murder victims. The plot eventually fell apart on August 8, 1973, when Henley brought his girlfriend along to deliver a new victim, Tim Kerley. Corll, a homosexual, flipped out in a rage when a girl showed up, and demanded Henley rape and murder her while he raped and murdered Kerley. Henley balked, a fight ensued, and Henley eventually shot Corll to death.
Although Henley confessed the crimes, to police that night, it wasn't until David Brooks turned himself in that the police began to accept the story (the disappearances had been written off as runaways by police). Brooks eventually led police to uncover 27 bodies, making Corll the, at the time, most prolific seial killer in American history.
Dennis Cooper first took a pass at the story with his book Jerk in 1993. Cooper, a literary bête noire in the vein of William S. Burroughs, grew up gay in California, joined the nascent punk scene in London in the 1970s, and by the mid-80s, when he began writing the fiction that would make him famous, was living in New York and associated with the downtown literary scene from which like-minded novelist Kathy Acker emerged.
Photo by Alain Monot, courtesy of On the Boards.
In 1993, he collaborated with artist Nayland Blake for a strange take on the story of the murders. (Out-of-print, but a sample is available at Amazon.) While we've been unable to determine if the hook is based on fact, the book, presented as an illustrated children's book, has an imprisoned David Brooks re-enacting the crimes with puppets (created and photographed by Blake). Enter Gisèle Vienne, a French philosophy student turned puppeteer. Starting in 2004, the pair (Cooper having relocated to Paris) began the process of realizing the vision onstage: three shorter plays, I Apologize, Une belle enfant blonde, and Kindertotenlieder, all on similar themes, led up to the current adaptation of Jerk.
One puppeteer appears as David Brooks, and with hand-puppets, in a perversion of guignol that the Grand Guignol would be proud of, rehashes the crimes in a manner that's caused the theatre to issue a warning about the graphic nature of the performance.
Vienne is one of France's hottest young theatrical avant-gardists (Jerk won praise when it debuted at the Avignon festival in July), and this is both her U.S. debut and the only North American appearance currently scheduled for the work. Tickets are already in short supply (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were sold out by last week) but call the box office at 206-217-9888 to check. This is a performance not to be missed.
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