Playwright Jacob Wasson Opens 'Other People's Dead Dads' in NYC

Other People’s Dead Deads is the story of Ollie, a paid funeral mourner who gets hired by families across America to show up as their missing, estranged or dead gay sons. For a price, Ollie attends funerals to eulogize a father who passed, painting him as the all-star dad any gay son would be proud of. The role Ollie, which mirrors that of a sex worker, is played by Cole Doman known for his work in last summer’s critically acclaimed indie Mutt, the seminal queer short Henry Gamble's Birthday Party and the upcoming Apple TV series The Savant across from Jessica Chastain. Doman portrays Ollie with the nuance and fervor of the mental, emotional and logistical challenges of using one's body to sell a service.

“My favorite play is theGood Person of Szechwan,” Wasson says. First performed in 1943, the play is about a god loving prostitute named Shen Te who is so ostracized by her neighbors that she is forced to create a male alter ego who is tough, pragmatic and can exact payment from clients. The farce is such a success that the male alter ego is actually accused of murdering Shen Te until the final scene when she admits they are the same person.

“Brecht made me feel that theater has a tangible social purpose,” Wasson says, “And it can be stupid or fake or magical or real, but it makes us confront ourselves.”

Other People’s Dead Dads employs its own magic and artifice to bend the constraints of reality. Throughout the show Ollie crashes into a theatrical purgatory where he finds gay martyrs of history mid festivities. The gay martyrs, all women, caustically explain to Ollie the inherent misogyny of how gay men worship the suffering of women while lamenting the pros and cons of being “held hostage by remembrance.”

“I wanted to write about how gay men talk about, use, digest and claim women, especially the women we love because through loving them, we torture them,” Wasson says. “We make arguments out of people, out of flesh and bone. We talk about pop stars and actresses like they are non-human entities.” Over two Acts the show becomes about corpses and the bodies we use to make a point. How does America use the bodies of gay men, and how do gay men maneuver and manipulate bodies that are not their own?

The premise is ambitious and so is Wasson, who came to New York in 2019originally to become a broadway dancer. He had trained to dance since he was two years old, but stopped auditioning completely to focus on writing. “I was frustrated with the way theater in New York was treating its audience,” Wasson says. “The work was condescending. The plays had this air of self-importance like they were there to teach me some great lesson. I don't think that's what good theater’s function is. I want audiences to feel like they are seeing something that actually respects them, that actually challenges and trusts them.”

While in college, Wasson put on plays in basements recruiting his friends to act in his productions. That scrappiness would come in handy when he got to New York and found ways to put on table readings of early drafts of Other People’s Dead Dads in friends’ living rooms and once in the Jewish Community Center in Harlem. In the Summer of 2023, for his second play, he staged an underground production of SMUTA in an unfinished gymnasium. SMUTA began as a play about his great-grandfather who came to the United States from Russia, imagining what would have happened in an alternate world if his great-grandfather had stayed.

James Scully, currently playing Mary’s Teacher in Cole Escola’s hit Broadway show “Oh, Mary!” starred in SMUTA and did four table readings of Other People’s Dead Dads.

“Jacob has an uncompromising devotion to his unique creative vision” Scully says. “Working with him is always messy and chaotic and cathartic and beautiful and different. I would say the only unifying quality to every time we’ve worked together is that it has always been worth it.”

The first three nights of Other People’s Dead Dads were sold out with attendees that included Julio Torres, Jeffery Self, Brandon Flynn, Jordan Tannahill, Jaboukie Young-White and Director Levan Akin, whose critically acclaimed second film, Crossing, is playing up the street from Other People’s Dead Dads at the Angelika. Adam Rodner, head of production at Folk Media Group and a producer who is somewhat of a wunderkind with extraordinary projects under his belt at 29, explains that “Jacob tows that line all great writers do between being both a fierce protector of his vision and an unprecious and spirited collaborator. You can go toe-to-toe with him and it just makes you want to fight for him more.”

A playwright's most important collaborator is their director and it took an extensive process before Rodner and Wasson knew this was a play for Rory Pelsue. Best known for directing the livestream production of the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Circle Jerk, Wasson calls Pelsue “an encyclopedia of gay liturgy and references who cares deeply about text.”

Pelsue facilitated the participation of many other collaborators. He brought in Josh Barilla to do the set, where there is no curtain so the audience enters through a drab kitsch mid-western funeral parlor complete with a pastel casket and plenty of evangelical guilt. The casket becomes the prop equivalent of a swiss army knife playing a role in almost every scene. At one point the coffin becomes a bath, lit with ethereal excellence by lighting designer Nicole E. Lang. Another scene ends when Ollie slams the coffin closed with a shattering thud that plays expertly into a kaleidoscope of sounds and samples under the careful direction of sound designer Kathy Ruvuna.

The director also included his frequent collaborator Cole McCarty to do costume design. McCarty explains that he views his job as designing “clothes not the costumes,” which Peluse calls “a subtle, and apt, distinction; he’s telling a story with clothes instead of dazzling us with his creativity for its own sake.”

By the end of the night, those clothes, especially Ollie's, are soaked in sweat, fake blood and pink hair dye. Doman is on stage for the majority of the two and a half hour run, bringing his character through various stages of grief, joy, anger and, at times, hallucination. His stamina is matched only by Jessica Litwak, who brilliantly plays four roles across the evening.

As “Since You’ve Been Gone” by Kelly Clarkson blared in the background of the opening night party, Wasson was asked the question every creative dreads. “What’s next?” Thankfully, the answer is easy. On August 25, he’ll preview part of his new show, El Dorado, in the meat rack on Fire Island. The piece, about police entrapment at the MeatRack in the ’60s, was commissioned by Little Island and is to be staged in collaboration with BOFFO.

“I want to keep making great work, and I want to keep creating an audience and meeting people with art, Wasson says. “I just want to keep doing this and pay my rent a little more easily.”

For tickets to Other People's Dead Dads, click here.

Photography: Hunter Abrams