Jerry Metzker Biography

Jerry Metzker is a playwright, dramaturg, solo performer, actor, director, musician, trapeze artist and theater maker whose fascination with theater has been omnipresent in his life since he was a child. When he was in third grade, he adapted a short story from literature class, “George Washington and the Silver Dollar” into a play in which he directed and played George Washington. When he was in fifth grade, in the lunch line, Jerry’s response to a friend’s telling him that he was cast in a local production of The King and I by singing “Playground in My Mind” was, “That’s it? I can do that.” His first role as an actor was playing Professor Kokintz in The Mouse That Roared when he was in eighth grade.

That production launched his theater career. In high school, he acted in several productions, wrote comedy material and performed in three variety shows and played in the pit orchestra of a musical. During his four years in college, he worked on 26 different theater productions in several capacities, from actor to director to props master. Over two summers, he performed and house managed on the Showboat Becky Thatcher in Marietta, Ohio. During another summer, he was a singing waiter in Glacier National Park in Montana, where he also directed and performed in a one-night presentation of the musical melodrama No, No, A Thousand Times, No.  

He moved to New York City to attend graduate school at Columbia University, where he earned his MFA in dramaturgy/dramatic criticism, worked in various capacities, including dramaturg, for 22 theater productions, wrote theater reviews for “Stages” magazine, and critiqued plays for the Young Playwrights Festival and the 20th Century Playwrights Festival. He coordinated Circle Repertory Theatre’s renowned Playwrights Lab and assistant directed the world premier of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel’s Amulets Against the Dragon Forces. He spent his summers in the literary office of Nikos Psacharapolous’s Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he contributed to or wrote several special literary events and worked on the Emmy Award-winning documentary, Broadway’s Dreamers: The Legacy of the Group Theatre.

Upon completing his degree, he worked for a time as the assistant to a literary talent manager in New York City before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the next five years, he wrote several magazine pieces on local theater and became a theater writer for The Bay Area Reporter, a weekly newspaper. During this time, he became affiliated with the Z Space and joined its development lab, subsequently leading its off shoot, the Artists Development Lab, a collective of theater artists who supported each other in creating theater. In this role, he produced dozens of stage readings and other presentations at the Z Space, the Marsh and the Phoenix Theater.

As a playwright, he has presented a number of short and long solo and ensemble plays, including Your Guardian Angel Is Exhausted (which reopened the Marsh after the COVID-19 pandemic, October 2021), For Better or Worse (MarshStream, August 2020), Mercy Buckets (San Francisco Fringe Festival, September 2011), Queerification and His Heart Belongs to Me (co-produced by Theatre Rhinoceros, 2020 and 2019, respectively), Oh Fuck, You’re Old (LGBT Writes! at The Marsh Café, San Francisco, June 2008), two one-page plays at consecutive foolsFURY events (San Francisco, 2018 and 2019, respectively) and three one-page plays produced by ABYDOS/The Directors Theater. His first full-length play, Hot Summer Night (a LGBTQ+ satire of the conflation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Sondheim/Lapine’s Into the Woods) was an Honorable Mention at the 1999 Bay Area Playwrights’ Festival. Several other plays have been workshopped.

During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021, he took to the airwaves with live-streamed and recorded performances, including a multi-character reading of Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks, a six-part series of pandemic exercise hopes called Time to Exercise featuring Barry the Exercise Guy, Ms. Victory Jaronda on sheltering (which was included in the Theatre Rhinoceros Virtual Benefit Pandemic Performances) and as noted, For Better or Worse on the Monday Night MarshStream.

In 2013, Jerry created a series of theatrical installations under the moniker Sign Theater, in which two-to-five performers would perform holding descriptive signs, intermingling with street fairgoers. These took place for several months and has since led to crafting two different sign-connected installation-style, audience-participation plays.

In 2018, Jerry was enlisted by John Fisher, award-winning playwright and actor, to direct him in his first solo play, A History of World War II, in which Fisher was awarded Best Actor at the New York Solo Festival. In November of that year, they presented the play at the Marsh in San Francisco, and it went on to play through 2019 (at the Marsh in San Francisco and Berkeley, and at the Broadwater Black Box in Hollywood, CA). In 2020, Jerry directed Fisher in a second solo play, The History of the Civil War, which premiered at the Playground Solo Festival. They also co-directed a production of Ira Levin’s Death Trap at Theatre Rhinoceros.

As a dramaturg, he was worked on the world premiers of Fighting Mac written and directed by John Fisher, and Flaming Iguanas written and directed by John Fisher and Duca Knicevec, at Theatre Rhinoceros, as well as the award-winning Medea, the Musical, written and directed by John Fisher. Jerry has provided dramaturgical support to such playwrights as Lanford Wilson, Terrence McNally, Craig Lucas, Jose Rivera, John Bishop, John Fisher, Kia Corthron, Gordon Dahlquist and Kate Moira Ryan

As an actor, Jerry made his professional debut as Amos Quackenbush in a one-night only production of No, No, a Million Times No! by Eskel Crawford and Bud Thompson, which he also directed. He was an ensemble player for a summer on the Becky Thatcher Showboat in four melodramas, performed multiple roles in John Fisher/Duca Knicevec’s adaptation of Flaming Iguanas, performed several solo plays and read roles in dozens of readings.

Jerry is a trapeze artist and performed in several venues in the Oakland area. As a musician, he plays six different instruments.