If you’re not familiar with the term “PrEP,” you might not exactly be part of the target audience for the play PrEP’d, a raunchy sex-positive comedy that is this weekend finishing up its month-long run this weekend at The Foundry through Plays of Wilton. But if you didn’t know, PrEP is actually a handy-dandy acronym for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, a type of medication approved in the 2010s for use by gay men who are at risk of contracting HIV through anal sex. PrEP is 99 percent effective at preventing the transmission of HIV within this population, and this particular play was commissioned through a grant from the CAN Community Health Foundation specifically to explore this particular subject.
But don’t go into PrEp’d expecting it to have a preachy PSA kind of vibe based on this origin story. On the contrary, its no-holds-barred approach to its salacious subject matter actually warrants an almost opposite warning. In other words: if you’re the type of person who might be made at all uncomfortable by characters who are up-front about how much they want to be fucked in the ass, this may not be exactly your kind of play.
But if you did have a somewhat more prudish sensibility, you’d at least probably figure out pretty quickly that you were entirely in the wrong place, given that the play’s introductory scene is a fantasy sequence in which our main character Jerry imagines an ideal world in which he, as a child, had been able to freely discuss his sexual proclivities with his parents.
“Do you cum in Mom’s ass or in her pussy?” the young Jerry asks his dad.
Now imagine that the “mom” in question is actually the bearded and otherwise unmistakably male actor Sam Lantz hilariously costumed to resemble a sixties housewife, and you’ve got a slightly better idea of the sort of vibe the show does have—irreverent, flamboyant, and entirely unabashed.
Harry Redlich carries the show as a present-day “narrator” Jerry who is looking back on his past, as the other members of the ensemble (Zach Krouch, Jeffrey Roach, Jack Stein, Gianni Palermo, Lantz, Geoff Freitag and Ben Prayz) play Jerry at other stages of his life along with various other featured roles.
After moving from this fantasy into Jerry’s actual, less idyllic childhood, it moves through the confused intensity of his erotic coming of age. Since neither of Jerry’s parents are open to frank discussions about sex or sexuality—this made particularly ironic by the fact that his father is a gynecologist— he is left to piece together the facts of life by looking up individual definitions in the dictionary. While they lean on religion as a rationale for their prudishness— Jerry finds that the Bible turns him on.
Once Jerry enters his early adolescence, he excitedly seizes the opportunity to realize his fantasies as he revels in his first few IRL hookups. But, unfortunately, this awakening is taking place in what is approaching the late 1980s—and the HIV/AIDS epidemic is about to rear its ugly head.
As Jerry hears national-news horror stories and then goes on to watch countless members of his community be decimated by the disease, he soon finds himself at odds with his own desires. For the next two decades, he limits his further experimentation to only the very safest of circumstances. This puts him in his early forties in 2012, which is when PrEP makes its pharmacological debut.
Given this exciting development, you might think that Jerry would be pretty eager to get back on his “horse” and embrace his whorier side—but it turns out that years of fearing that every roll in the hay could have fatal consequences can’t necessarily be vanquished with the advent of a magic pill.
Emotionally and physically, Jerry still feels a need to play it safe, settling into a long-term “situationship” with a sweet-natured younger man named Javier instead of looking for greater romantic or sexual fulfillment. As the sultry stud in question, actor Gianni Palermo nails the character’s carefree vibe and endearingly unserious sincerity. While you probably couldn’t call the pair a love match, it does eventually become clear that they genuinely care about each other— but, even then, Jerry’s reticence has become so entrenched that he cannot fully sexually surrender to his hot young lover.
But, for Jerry, trying to dip his toes into the larger dating pool also proves pretty overwhelming. Difficult as its been to navigate “the apps” as a cisgender woman, I can only imagine the additional complexity of attempting to assess suitors who may or may not be HIV positive, may or may not be on PrEP, and may or may not fall into a sexually compatible category (e.g. top, bottom)—and who may or may not be being truthful when proclaiming they are any of the above.
Not that things are necessarily any easier for a man trying to meet a man the old-fashioned way. At a “gay halloween party,” Jerry stumbles into a man named Patrick who, emotionally, seems like almost his perfect match. The two dive headfirst into what would become a deeply committed relationship—only to eventually discover that their respective sexual styles make them fundamentally incapable of satisfying one another in one critically important way.
Accordingly, it isn’t until after the aforementioned relationship has dissolved into mutual dissatisfaction that Jerry can fully find the freedom to act on his long-repressed desires, embracing the protection that PrEP affords. And while his subsequent attempt to experience the entirety of what the gay internet has to offer also doesn’t exactly go as planned, it does lead him into a meet-cute with a pretty promising suitor—one whose appearance was foreshadowed in the play’s prologue as the precursor to a hard-won happy ending.
Especially as someone who came into the play as a relative outsider to the subculture it explores, I found it to be a tastefully written and theatrically well-designed way to touch on a relatively specific sub-topic. The storytelling device of different Jerrys for every era smartly shows the character’s changing personality and perspective, allowing the more mature version of the character to offer insightful commentary on the experiences of his past self. Plenty of other playful staging and design twists and colorful side characters keep things plenty engaging throughout the show’s hour-and-a-half run time, ensuring that Prep’d never really dulls in its enveloping intensity. I thus found the play to be a thoroughly entertaining way to spend its full-throttle 90 minutes, along with an illuminating glance into aspects of gay male life I’d never really had occasion to consider,
Since the show has proved an uncontested hit, there are only a few tickets to be found for the three performances that remain of this original, amusing, and highly horny theatrical escapade.
In the meantime, at least I’ve (finally) taken the time to document for posterity the existence of this wholesomely unwholesome little show, and to salute everyone involved in bringing PrEP’d to life to the delight of countless audience members!
