The Jocker: Riding The Rails

I suppose you're never too old to learn gay slang and thanks to Clint Jeffries' rather touching romantic drama, The Jocker, premiering at the Wings Theatre, I am now intimately familiar with the terms "jocker" and "punk."

Set in the 1930's at the height of The Great Depression, Jeffries paints a gritty picture of the lifestyle of hobos; men who lived on the road, hopping free rides across the country by sneaking onto moving freight trains traveling from one hard manual labor job to another.  In this exclusively male setting, where workers stay in makeshift shantytowns, The Jocker depicts a world where open homosexuality is not only accepted, but where straight men partake in gay sex, and sometimes gay romance, to escape the unbearable loneliness of their situation.  One of the most interesting aspects of The Jocker is that because of the extreme circumstances of hobo life, it's never certain which of the characters are gay (or bisexual) by birth and which may be just be straight men desperate for any kind of intimacy in a world without women.

Hobos would often partner up for companionship, whether intimate or platonic, to help make their travels easier and cheaper.  The Jocker's main focus is on two couples.  'Bama (Jason Alan Griffin) and Shakespeare (Michael Lazar) are in a healthy loving relationship, with Shakespeare being new to the road and 'Bama (he's from Alabama) showing him the ropes.  The large and brutish Biloxi Billy (Stephen Cabral) is a jocker; an older hobo who takes on a young traveling companion, called a punk, to be his lackey, servant and sex slave. Billy's punk, the 16-year old Nat (Nick Mathews), longs to be free of his abusive relationship and 'Bama, a former punk himself, takes on a fatherly role with the frightened boy.  In the play's most horrifically dramatic scene Nat begs 'Bama to take him on as his new punk, promising he knows far more ways to sexually satisfy him than Shakespeare does.  Mathews is just crushingly pathetic in his character's complete lack of self-esteem.

A third pairing involves Lucky (Stephen Tyrone Williams), the play's only black man, who makes his living turning tricks for men, and Dodger (David Tachney) a married man who starts purchasing his favors out of loneliness, but winds up developing romantic feelings for him.

While fleshing out the characters' relationships, and showing a lot of flesh in the process, the connecting thread of a plot involves a robbery Billy is trying to pull off, the success of which depends on Nat's ability and willingness to follow his orders.

Though the play has its share of soap opera-ish moments, the fine ensemble cast, under director Jeffrey Corrick, performs with dramatic earnestness.  L.J. Kleeman's costumes may be period accurate, but they seem too clean and are often worn in a manner to show off the physiques of the buff cast.  (Nat, for example, wears his overalls with the side buttons undone, as if to tease the audience with a bit of side posterior.)  Williams Ward's sparse set, mostly a chain link fence with a big sky backdrop, emphasizes the loneliness of life on the road.

Though thick with sexual violence and a tragic finish, The Jocker's strength lies in its tender depictions of the human need for love and its value in overcoming any hardship.

Photos by Carol Rosegg:  Top:  Michael Lazar and Jason Alan Griffin

Center:  Stephen Cabral and Stephen Tyrone Williams

Bottom:  Jason Alan Griffin and Nick Mathew

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