If I were a gay man it is likely that I would pick up a picket sign and march around the LGBT Center in Downtown Milwaukee.

That’s the site of the production of "Jerker" which opened Wednesday night under the direction of Mark Bucher, artistic director of the Boulevard Theatre.

I have been going to the theater for over half a century and I have never heard a play this dirty. Whatever is in second place is a long way behind.

But it’s not the dirt that would upset me. We can all live with lots of explicit language.

What I found so off-putting was the conceit of the play that portends to be a drama of the growth of a relationship between two gay men, forged on the telephone, in 20 calls.

I don’t doubt for a minute that such a thing is possible. But this play falls far short of its promise. It starts with phone sex that could curl your hair, two strangers hooked at the genitals by a phone cord.

Seventy-five minutes later, as we approach the end of the play, they are still talking about what they want to do to each other and what they want done to themselves.

If I were a gay man I could well be insulted by the one-dimensional image of these men. They reinforce the absolute worst kind of stereotypes of gay men: Gay men are promiscuous and they just care about sex.

I find that kind of portrayal offensive.

The billing of this play is that it is one of the most important plays ever written about gay men. I guess I could argue that the love between Antonio and Bassanio in "Merchant of Venice" is pretty much more important than this.

The very end of the play has J. R., one of the two men, believing and realizing that the other one, Bert, has died of AIDS.

The play is set in 1985 San Francisco, just as the rest of the world was waking up to the HIV scare. The gay community was further along in awareness, but the issue had yet to grow into a worldwide concern.

This play is a staged reading with two actors, Bill Jackson and Marty McNamee, sitting on stools reading their lines. Ostensibly this is so that the audience will be able to focus on the words of the playwright without any of all those other nasty parts of a play, like costumes, music, movement and so forth.

Jackson and McNamee were just fine, but they only had very shallow water to wade in. Nobody got underwater or even very wet.

And it’s really a shame. This material is ripe for a play. The very idea of two men growing to actually care about each other as human beings and not just sexual, transitory sex toys is an appealing one and seems like fertile ground to till.

But the inability of this play to show actual growth in these men prevents any fire from shooting sparks.

What we have is a simple show of fireworks without any ooohs or aaahs from the crowd.

CREDITS: Director, Mark Bucher; Production Designer, Maeve Jackson; Production Coordinator, Holly Blomquist; Technical Assistance, Jaime Jastrab. Visit the website for more information.