John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Jerome” arrives at Playwrights Horizons this May as both a homecoming and a reckoning. The acclaimed playwright returns to the theater where his previous work “Wet Brain” earned critical acclaim, this time bringing a deeply personal story rooted in his own Arizona childhood—a play about two aging gay men living in isolation in a ghost town, and what happens when a stranger arrives asking them to reconsider the shape of their love.

Set in Jerome, Arizona, during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s, “Jerome” centers on Con and Doane, army veterans and longtime partners who have built a quiet life far from the chaos of cities and other people. Their monogamous, cautious existence—what they joke amounts to “unusually milquetoast” sex lives for gay men—shifts when Bruin arrives, fleeing his damaged past and falling into their arms. What unfolds is what Caswell describes as “a community of necessity,” a throuple born not from desire alone but from the exigencies of illness, aging, and the desire to care for those we love.

For Caswell, the play emerges from lived experience and inherited trauma. Growing up closeted in rural Arizona during the 1980s and 90s, he watched the AIDS crisis unfold through news reports and saw in those deaths a preview of what his own future might hold. “There’s a generation of elder-millennial gay people who have, because of this, inherited a much more paranoid, heteronormative version of homosexuality,” he explains. “This play is me writing from that divide between the fear I grew up and lived much of my life with, and freedom.”

The setting itself carries personal resonance. Caswell’s great-grandmother lived in Camp Verde, 30 miles southeast of Jerome, and family road trips introduced him to the neighboring towns during the 1990s when Jerome functioned as a tourist ghost town. He recalls the “compelling queerness” of the place—a destination for spiritual seekers, crystal hawkers, and those searching for vortex energy. But what stuck with him most profoundly was a single image: two men sitting on a bench together in a way that was “so familiar but that I had never seen before,” in blood-red conservative Yavapai County. Those men became the seeds of Con and Doane.

“Jerome” marks a significant collaboration between Caswell and director Dustin Wills, who previously helmed “Wet Brain” and, in doing so, won an Obie Award for his interpretation of the playwright’s confined, seismically charged worlds. Wills brings his signature theatrical approach to this new work—one that blurs the boundary between the real and imagined. “I think of John’s plays as works where the real and imagined are coexisting on top of each other,” Wills says. “Very real human beings are in relief against an uncanny world. The vibration between those things is an exciting place for me.”

The cast brings considerable weight to the intimate three-hander. Two-time Tony Award winner Stephen Spinella, known for originating the role of Prior in “Angels in America,” plays Con. Tyrone Mitchell Henderson, fresh from Broadway’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” plays Doane. Ken Barnett, whose credits span Broadway (“Wonderful Town”), Off-Broadway, and television, plays Bruin—the catalyst that disrupts the couple’s carefully constructed equilibrium.

Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield frames “Jerome” as an unconventional entry in the AIDS narrative canon. “Jerome, Arizona, is far from where we expect to see a story about queerness,” he notes. “And this trio of gay men, growing old in the desert, are far from what we expect from a queer story set during the peak of the AIDS epidemic. But John Caswell’s plays are always far from anything we can expect to see; and this play is not about a community dying so much as it’s about a community finding itself.”

The production arrives as the explosive conclusion to Playwrights Horizons’ 2025-26 season—a year devoted to exploring “the nature of the group against the backdrop of a fraying nation.” “Jerome” extends that inquiry into the most intimate possible group: a relationship, tested and transformed by desire, illness, and time.