JASON

JASON is a verbatim piece of theatre, using recorded delivery to stage PORTRAIT OF JASON, the seminal cult classic documentary about the Black Queer experience in 1960s NY.

Filmed in a single, drunken night at an NYC apartment, Shirley Clarke’s 1967 documentary “Portrait of Jason” is a shifting depiction of an enigmatic subject, Jason Holliday – in his own words a “hustler” and a “houseboy”, a “stone whore” and a “male bitch”, a “vicious cunt” and a “sweet, sensitive child”.

Clarke and her boyfriend, the actor Carl Lee, feature as Jason’s unseen and seemingly objective interlocutors, but as the night progresses, their personal entanglements with Jason become bitterly apparent.

Clarke’s documentary was a landmark moment in queer cinema and masterpiece of cinéma vérité, which Ingmar Bergman described as “the most extraordinary film I’ve seen in my life”. JASON is a theatrical interpretation of Portrait of Jason exploring the enduring intrigue of the film: its radical subject, its unreliable creators, and the critical events that led up to, and got left out of, Clarke’s “portrait”.