Writer, choreographer, and performer Jack Ferver’s genre-defying performances interrogate and indict psychological and socio-political issues, particularly in the realms of gender, sexuality, and power struggles. Weaponizing spectacle and stark naturalism, character and self, humour and horror, their performance practice is rooted in the shattering effects of trauma, and the numerous selves that can arise from that shattering.
In Ferver’s latest dance-theater piece, My Town—their 16th full-length performance work—the small town is a portal that provides special access into questions of self-expression and collective agency. Set loosely in an area of Upstate New York, My Town considers the queer experience outside urban metropoles, and the ways physical geography mark the interior terrains of the mind.
Ahead of the New York City premiere of My Town at NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 21st and Saturday, 22nd, 2025, Jack Ferver speaks with The Queer Review’s editor James Kleinmann about the work’s origins and evolution, how it relates to Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town, and how childhood trauma continues to inform their practice as a choreographer and theatremaker. Exclusive photography for The Queer Review by Steven Menendez.
James Kleinmann, The Queer Review: Great to see you again. We met at the launch of the restoration of Daisy von Scherler Mayer’s 1995 film Party Girl, when you hosted the Q&A with Parker Posey. It looked like the two of you go way back.
Jack Ferver: “Yes, Parker and I have known each other for years, but we became really close over a decade ago. Before I moved upstate full-time, I lived with her while I was teaching at Bard College, where I still teach. Parker and I have been cosmic siblings for a long time now. I was so happy that the reissue of Party Girl transformed into a real appreciation for her work and the tremendous contribution that she has made as an actor. I’m so glad that she’s receiving her very well deserved laurels.”
“We’ve been there for each other and talked about what it means to have a career that functions in terms of the of entertainment industry, while maintaining a core as an artist and as a poet. She’s so appreciative of that and has been so supportive of my work. Her words about it to me have been so bolstering. It’s one of those relationships that has been very symbiotic and helpful in terms of navigating being an artist and being in the public eye and always wanting to stay true to the art in our different ways.”
Let’s dive into My Town. How did it come about?
“It’s rather winding, but it all began with Jay Wegman, the executive director of NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. We’ve known each other for forever. Back when he was the artistic director of Abrams Art Center, he gave me free rehearsal space. I couldn’t have made my work if he hadn’t done that because I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Initially, Jay proposed that I do something at Skirball inspired by the book Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy, which is a stunning work. It’s a collage of photos, news clippings and police reports covering 1885 to 1910 in rural Wisconsin, particularly around the Black River Falls area, not that far from where I grew up.”
“I was intrigued by the idea, especially as I’ve now moved out of New York City to this upstate town that resembles where I come from. I grew up on the Wisconsin River, near the train tracks that faced the Wisconsin Ferry Bluffs. Now I live on the Hudson River on train tracks that face the Catskill Mountains. That felt very curious to me. I wondered whether I had a strange longing to return to a similar environment, even though I couldn’t wait to get out of the town where I grew up because I was tremendously bullied there. I was targeted. I was singled out. That experience put a fire under my feet to get out of there as quickly as I could.”
“As I set out to find an academic approach to explore similarities between South Central Wisconsin and where I live now in Upstate New York I quickly become bored. It wasn’t going to be the kind of show that I would want to see. I think artists should make shows that they would want to see themselves. That’s certainly what I have done in my career. As I began to drift away from that initial concept, a story of this woman came forward to me. She’s a teacher, who wants to be a poet and maybe wants to live her life as a man in 1911 in the town where I live now. Something has happened with one of her students. It’s all fiction and I don’t know where this all came from.”
“For the majority of the pandemic lockdown in 2020 I was living at Parker’s upstate, so I was removed from New York City for the longest that I had ever been since first moving there in 1997. I spent most of my time writing. I would take walks or go for runs, swim and then write some more. When I was finished, I read it to a dear friend of mine who said, ‘This is a novella, darling, not a performance. You can’t do this. You can’t hold people hostage. It’s an audio book, not a show.’ So I went back and began cutting away at it.”
“Our Town naturally came up as I was thinking about small towns and small town America and who gets put into those stories and who doesn’t. I find Our Town to be quite a vengeful play. Emily Webb dies in childbirth and then there is this gay-coded chorus director, Simon Stimson, who kills himself. I was curious about their deaths and what it would mean for them to have some kind of revenge through me. This woman and this queer-coded character.”
“I began thinking about where I grew up and the haunting of space, layering itself on top of itself. Is it possible to move away? Do you ever move away or does the space follow you? All of that transformed into the current script for My Town which begins in 1911, perhaps in this town that I’m currently living in. As the story unfolds, I get ricocheted back to South Central Wisconsin at a turning point in my life, which was my parents’ death. Then things fall apart. I land between those time zones, as well as between many different people. I’m many different women in this work and some men. At some point, I’m a version of myself and other gender nonconforming folks. All of these different voices came forward to me.”
“Something I’m excited about, that solidified with this piece, about my work being the many voices that happen from the shattered psyche from trauma, is that the stage itself is the psyche and I will be all of those voices jockeying for attention. People might view it as many aspects of one person or they might view it as the many voices of people who’ve been ghosted in America. As I was writing, I was thinking about who gets subtly ghosted in American stories and how they haunt. That’s ultimately what this work arrived at.”
How do you incorporate the music and video created by Jeremy Jacob for the work?
“When I knew that I would be making a solo show at NYU Skirball, which is a giant space, I started asking myself, ‘What else will be there?’ So part of it was formal, I knew that I wanted something visually large inside of this very large space where I myself am going to feel quite small. I also knew that I wanted it to be able to travel and was keeping in mind the money that isn’t there for the touring of queer performance art like this that rides the line between humour and horror and is examining trauma. So video made the most sense in that way and also because it’s a projection of the mind. We worked very hard to make sure that the video didn’t feel merely illustrative or assistive to the text, but rather that it would be its own psychic space that I’m also dwelling inside of.”
“For a while, Jeremy and I’ve been talking about what it would it be like to have a show that is completely underscored and Jeremy accomplished that. This is the hardest work I’ve done. It is a pleasure and a complete terror to perform. I’ve never felt more afraid to perform anything. The text itself is so dense, it’s difficult to get through. Then to have the projection and the music running underneath me and to be continually moving for the entirety of it adds to that challenge. It’s also live, so things change. The show people see on Friday night will not be the same show that people see on Saturday. There are some very specific things that I won’t reveal that will always be different.”
“I’m glad that I love teaching as much as I love making art. In my performance composition classes, I tell my students to look for what they don’t see and perhaps that’s what they want to make. What I haven’t seen a lot of is mystery and humour at the same time. I don’t mean an easy sophomoric humour, but the humour of recognition; that laugh that you have when you recognize some wonderful or some really terrible part of yourself or part of life. When it comes to mystery, we seem to be challenged by being able to withstand it. Everyone wants to say they know exactly what’s happening which is continuing to make a tremendous crisis. The work itself has a lot of mystery even to me. This is the first piece I’ve made where I’m not quite sure where some of it came from.”
How has where and how you grew up informed your work?
“Where and how I grew up was incredibly traumatic. It was physically violent. Daily. It was haunting and upsetting. Having gone to therapy, so much of my practice is based on psychoanalysis and the study of what happens through duress. Not only textually, but it’s also where my choreography comes from. My dance practice began when I got a scholarship to go to Interlochen Arts Camp and then got a full scholarship to go onto the academy. I was obsessed with Martha Graham. With this woman’s work that broke the zeitgeist of dance and really examined it from a psychological perspective.”
“I’ve been honing in on my own choreography in terms of its psychological iconography, in terms of the psychosomatics of the body, and how to work with that in a rehearsal container towards performance. The horror and the ecstasy of doing that in performance is a razor’s edge in terms of what is happening for me physically inside of that. All of that was so informed by this sense of not being heard when I was growing up. Being told that what was happening to me wasn’t happening, when it was physically clear on my body that it was. I could see where I’d been hit. I remember being cut quite deeply once and what it was like to have a teacher say to me, ‘Here, put it in this water for a moment and then keep going.’
“That sense of non-consensual reality created such a sense of isolation. These things have all felt very important to me inside of the work that I make. I care deeply about—and very much want to somehow reach—those who are injured and targeted for being queer, from being such a deeply hated minority. I am looking to get to those people, not only live, but by video too. At a certain point, My Town will go up on my website for free as almost all of my pieces have done because I don’t get to travel to small towns with my work. Although we’re hoping that My Town will tour, but I know that it won’t get everywhere. So the video is how to get it to those people who we can’t reach physically.”
“Early on in my career, when I was in my twenties and shifting from auditioning to realizing that I needed to make my own work, I told myself that I had to come up with one sentence about why I was doing that because it was a hard path to take. What I came up with was: ‘I’m doing this so that people don’t feel as lonely as I felt.’ That has sustained me for the 20 years that I’ve been doing this. It’s what drives me to write and it’s what drives me to create the choreography that I make. It’s what drives me to find a way to put them together to create these works that use theatre and dance in the performative act to express the content.”
“If I hadn’t had to fight so hard to hold on to my sanity when I was growing up, I don’t know that I would have that same deep sense of needing to fight to show the effects of trauma. I had to fight so hard as a child to do that and the only gift I have from that is for other people to not feel so alone inside of that experience. The only gift I have from it is what it can give to others. Trauma is isolating and as a child it’s terrifying because you don’t have agency. As an adult, it’s about how to discuss it openly and show it so that an audience can have a catharsis.”
“That’s what I’d say about growing up where I grew up. Because of the hell of it, I had to resort early on to finding a way to create as a way to sustain. So writing happened early. I think a lot of children go to a fantasy place, especially those who are being abused, so I’ve been curious about what that fantasy space is as an adult. What happens inside of that? There’s a lot there that I will never finish exploring through my work in my lifetime.”
Films have often been the inspiration for your previous work, how did that love and knowledge of film come into your life?
“Yes, most of my works before this piece have had some reference to a film. Growing up in a small town, films were what I latched on to. I was born in 1979, so the VCR was really happening when I was a child. It was so exciting to be able to rewind and repeat in this almost rehearsal-like way. The last show that I did in New York, Everything Is Imaginable, was so much about that in a lot of ways. I asked queer performers about who their childhood icon was and mine was Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. As a child I rewound and rewatched her coming back to life and then completely destroying her apartment over and over again. It was so core. That was what my childhood felt like. As if one part of me was killed at that point. There were times that were so close to death. So I feel really connected to Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. In terms of my film education as an adult, when I was 19 I remember going to TLA on 8th Street, which was the best video store in the city, and watching all of Fassbinder’s films and all of Bergman’s films.”
“My Town is unusual for me in that there isn’t a filmic reference. I only reference the play Our Town very briefly. I was contacted by the Thornton Wilder estate after the first preview piece came out mentioning Our Town and sent them my script. I told them that I love Wilder’s essay about how the American theatre had become soporific bullshit entertainment. He was offering a more demanding play that asked the audience if they were actually paying attention, with nothing on stage. I wrote to them about my appreciation not only for the really strange works that he made, but also that particular essay.”
“Ultimately, there is very little of Our Town in the work and that’s the only outside reference for My Town. I didn’t know how to talk about small town America without having that in there, and I really wanted Emily to have revenge with the stage manager. She asks, ‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it?’ The response is, ‘Saints and poets, maybe’. I wondered what would it be like if Emily blew up at this person? It’s so fun to get to be my version of Emily ever so briefly. “
By James Kleinmann
Jack Ferver’s My Town receives its New York City premiere at NYU Skirball on November 21st and 22nd at 7:30pm. For more information and to purchase tickets head to NYUSkirball.org. Visit Jack Ferver’s official website and follow them on Instagram @jackferver.
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