Broken Frontier

In the concluding section of Broken Frontier’s conversation with Jeff Krell, we discuss the Jayson musical, the world after Will & Grace, and Jayson’s return to comics.

Part 1 – Coming Up and Coming Out
Part 2 – Underground and Over the Top

Part 3 - Onstage and the Next Stage

BROKEN FRONTIER: You took a break from the Jayson strips for a quite a while. What were you working on?

JEFF KRELL: Well, in 1996 I started working on a Jayson musical (with songwriters Ron Romanovsky & Paul Phillips), because I’d wanted for some time to bring Jayson into another medium. My characters – certainly Robyn and Arena are both these showboats who just come into every scene looking like they’re gonna burst into song. I really didn’t think that mainstream television [was] ready for this. It was another five years ‘til Will & Grace came on the air, and I was an outsider. I wasn’t going to be the one to break down that wall.

BF: You were outside of the television industry?

JK: Yeah, completely, but there were a lot of gay-themed shows on and off-Broadway, and it seemed like… First of all it’s cheaper and easier to produce, and I was living in New York. I went to a lot of theatre. Also, I felt sort of obliged to go see a lot of gay theatre and it was all really a downer at the time. It was all, uhh…

BF: AIDS survival stories?

JK: AIDS, AIDS, We All Have AIDS!

BF: [Singing] Everybody has AAAIIIIDS!

JK: Exactly! We were laughing about that the other day. Especially when the Benetton campaign came out after that movie [Team America: World Police] took all that criticism. That was kind of what Broadway/Off-Broadway was at the time. Not all musical-ized, but it was all We all have AIDS and Everybody hates us and We’re all dead at the End - that kind of thing, real uplifting story of hope…

BF: Especially when it’s the status quo.

JK: Yeah, so I said, in wanting to bring Jayson to the stage, that it’s time to laugh again. So I stopped writing the comic strip and focused on the new material that had to be created, to turn essentially what was a bunch of episodes… Couple of things happened: I pulled all of the episodes together to say what would make sense to tell the story on stage.

In the process I said “this should be published in one place” because I was trying to raise money and people didn’t know what the strip was. They’d never heard of it. [If I had said] “well, it was in Meatmen,” that’s not going to raise you money on Broadway. I thought if everything was in one place that we could hand out as a promotion to people we were trying to get money from – [it would] say - This is part of a franchise. This is part of something that exists, and here it all is. That was actually the first thing I ended up self-publishing, the first Jayson collection in 1997. It was intended as promotion for the musical.

BF: That’s not the new collection…

JK: No, I selected stories that ended up in the script for the show. A lot of the second act had to be written from scratch. Now we know who these characters are, and they’re funny and they say all this witty stuff. Onstage I took them through the whole wedding episode. Act one ends with the wedding day and all that that portends and then act two opens with them marching down the aisle and then the audience is like the audience for the wedding, which worked out really well.

BF: When did this go to stage?

JK: It was produced Off Broadway in the summer of 1998 at the 45th Street theatre, which is the home of Primary Stages. It ran for ten weeks and I hope to revive it some day in Los Angeles.

BF: What kind of reviews did it get?

JK: It got really bad reviews. NOT all. What was interesting is reviewers who didn’t have a lot of baggage and didn’t come in with preconceived notions of what a musical should be (primarily the internet reviewers, who were younger) and just came to see [whether the show is] a good time – we got excellent reviews. The New York Times was actually pretty kind to us. I’m actually proud to say the New York Times came and reviewed it. They weren’t mean to us. They didn’t like the music of all things. They sort of liked the script. They thought some of the material was strong and translated well to the stage. They loved the cast, so I was pretty proud of that at least! I know my characters and I know who would be good to bring them to life. A lot of the other mainstream papers were really unkind to us and so was the gay press, for different reasons. What it really was, was a sitcom with music. It was still sort of episodic and it was like here’s an episode and here’s a song to go with it. Taken on these terms I think it worked, but if they were looking for a traditional musical, they weren’t going to find it.
It was an amazing experience.

BF: How did you return to the comics medium?

JK: I started writing screenplays. I moved to Los Angeles. Only a couple of years ago, when we started coming to the Con…

BF: 'We' meaning...?

JK: My partner Bud and I, at first just as tourists – because I love the comics medium and I’d gotten away from it for a while. I just got so excited again. Seeing what’s out there and seeing people creating and wanting to be part of that again. We have all this material that a whole generation doesn’t even know about anymore and I wanted to tell the stories. I wanted to bring Jayson into the new millennium. There’s so much more to tell. There’s so much more to say about where we are as gay people today.

     

BF: How do you view the older Jayson stories in today’s [more gay-tolerant] milieu and what kind of challenges does [the current climate] present?

JK: The first thing I say, with justifiable pride, is that the Jayson stories have stood the test of time. The current reviews seem to indicate that we’re vindicated that way. A lot of the stuff that I resisted in terms of characters being cardboard political cutouts mouthing a certain viewpoint - the critics of the day were saying “this strip is terrible because it doesn’t do those things. It doesn’t represent gay people the way we want gay people to be represented to the straight community!” [That] was never my agenda. My agenda was first and foremost to entertain, and to do that with three-dimensional characters with relationships that were fun, building conflict and telling a story. The stories hold up. I wasn’t intentionally targeting the mainstream audience, although there’s not a lot of sex or naughty parts. 

BF: A few curse words here or there.

JK: Words, certainly, because my characters speak the way my friends speak. They look like Archie, but they don’t talk like Archie.

Let’s put it this way – when Will & Grace came on the air, my friends who had followed the Jayson saga for fifteen years said “they stole your strip and they called it Will & Grace.” So, I’d like to believe that I was ahead of my time when I was doing it. In part because I wasn’t trying to target a mainstream audience and I’d assumed I was never going to achieve that anyway. So the audience has changed and has come around to being more accepting of the kind of material I was doing fifteen years ago. I look back and I laugh.

There’s some updating that has to be done to bring the characters into the new century. They would have a computer now.

BF: Cell phones were not really a thing in the 80s… Are there any clues about your future plans for Jayson?

JK: When I produced the Jayson musical, I worked with a number of young (18-22) gay and straight kids - and the one thing that surprised and pleased me is how little self-loathing there was among the gays and how casual it all seemed to the straights. This is an astounding shift that needs to be reflected. Robyn, of course, will always be a queen of a "certain age" for whom self-loathing is an artform (along with other-loathing) but I foresee some healthy growth for Jayson in this arena (pun intended).

I don’t want to give Jennifer Camper an inch, but my inspiration for the Portia character in the strip – I’d created a story called Jayson Dykes it Out, that introduced Portia. My experience with lesbians up until that point was a pretty negative one. The lesbians I knew were lesbian separatists – a philosophy I have never agreed with, and I think has NOT stood the test of time. Men were the enemy even if they were gay men, because they were still men. They were still the oppressors.

I was running Lesbians and Gays at Penn, and the lesbians had to have their own group, because they needed their space. But they also had to be invited to the gay group because it would be discriminatory [not to invite them]. We couldn’t have an all-male group, but we had to have an all-female group and we had to pretend that all of this was just fine. I just got tired of we need our space. I was taking that on when I created the Portia character. I didn’t make Portia evil. She has an evil ideology. I have some plans for Portia, I won’t disclose them because it’s actually kind of a big surprise, but I will say this much – She’s changed her tune!

BF: So, where can we find the new Jayson comics?

JK: Right now, only in my head. I’ve written out several story arcs, planned out the first twelve issues and each set of four issues would then become a new collection in the Jayson saga.

To learn more about Jeff Krell and Jayson, please visit Ignite! Entertainment . Look for new Jayson material in the web-anthology Young Bottoms in Love .