Les Mauvais Garçons
2002 · By Jake Hooker · HERE Arts Center
Adhesive Theater Project described Les Mauvais Garçons as a play about the absurdity, vulgarity, and often hidden poetry of modern life—about the desire to understand everything and the inability to understand anything.
From the American Living Room
The production appeared in HERE Arts Center’s American Living Room series. It was selected for repeat performances in a Best of the American Living Room program, with additional dates at Raw Space Studios during the August Art Festival and at HERE Arts Center.
The description is compact, but it gives the play a broad field. “Modern life” can hold public manners, private confusion, sudden vulgarity, and moments of poetry that are easy to miss. The opposing desire and inability to understand everything provides the work’s pressure. The title’s “bad boys” enter a world where explanation is always tempting and always incomplete.
Creative team
- Jake Hooker — playwright
- Cory Einbinder — director
- Ernesto Gomez — music direction
- Sarah Bergman — costumes
Cast
- Richard V. Licata
- Eric Giancoli
- Rob Marcato
- Hadar Lev-Tov
- Stu Richel
- Zack Kron
- Ian Jarvis
- Kalle Macrides
The company’s production page linked each name to an individual biography. This version keeps the names together as a cast list, preserving the roles people held in the project without carrying over résumés, personal details, or later claims.
Place in the company history
Les Mauvais Garçons followed the early visual experiments of The Battles of Coxinga, Spring Awakening, and Kirby. Its writing-centered description looks spare beside the elaborate technical lists of later productions, but music direction and costume remained part of its assembly. The return engagements also make it an important point in the company’s public record.
The company later worked with Jake Hooker on Hysteria: HYSTERIA, a 2005 dance-theater piece built from an amalgam of source texts and a movement score. Together, the two projects show different ways his writing entered Adhesive’s collaborative practice: one through the hidden poetry of modern life, the other through fragments shaped by bodies in motion.
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