“I’m thirty-fucking-nine years old. I don’t do white picket fences either. So what do you do if you’re not acquiring kids or adopting antiques? Yoga? I think you’re telling me to ‘grow up’ but I’m not too sure what that would look like, you know? What are we talking about, a Costco membership? Khaki pants?”                      - Tuffer, Act One, The Jamb

Gay punks Tuffer and Roderick are turning forty. Neither wants to face it.

While Tuffer continues to smoke, snort and screw his way through Manhattan’s much younger gay male population, Roderick’s gone as straight as possible for activism and martial arts. With the arrival of Tuffer’s latest boy toy, Brandon, Roderick can take no more. After a disastrous quasi-intervention, he drags Tuffer to rural New Mexico for one last ass-kicking detox.

But when Roderick’s mother Abigail, a formerly successful folk singer, throws the guys a very organic birthday party, twenty years of tension comes to a head. Tuffer and Roderick must confront one another, and themselves, in a kind of exile on the high desert. Each is on the verge of something new, almost somewhere, in a jamb.

The Jamb is a coming of middle-age story for American queers who never quite embraced the identities prescribed them. Simply staged but aggressively theatrical, J.Stephen Brantley’s latest full-length play arrives uncomfortably post-Will And Grace to ask ‘What the fuck now?’

The Jamb has been produced as a staged reading in Dixon Place's HOT Festival of Queer Performance, at the 2009 Planet Connections Festivity, and in TOSOS Theatre's Chesley/Chambers Reading Series. It was produced by Eclectic Company Theatre in Los Angeles in January 2010.

Now we're looking to bring Tuffer and Roderick back to where their story began. If you'd like to contribute to the New York premiere of The Jamb, please contact us at Jamb@HardSparks.com