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IMPRESSIONS: Jack Ferver Presents "My Town" at NYU Skirball
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on December 1, 2025
Jack Ferver in "My Town." Photo by Greg Kessler
Writer, Choreographer and Performer: Jack Ferver
Scenic Design, Music and Video: Jeremy Jacob
Management: Garen Scribner, Pilot MGMT
Co-commissioned by NYU Skirball and EMPAC — Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Jack Ferver knows how to set a scene. They also know how to play a character. In My Town, scenic landscapes emerge as characters just as the interior lives of characters reveal the contours of their psychological terrain. Through a synthesis of words and movement (written and performed by Ferver) with sound and visual design (by Jeremy Jacob), the result is a tense and haunting portrait of trauma and repression in small town America.
Ferver, who grew up in south central Wisconsin and now lives in the Hudson Valley, draws parallels across textures of place as they spool out the shattered lives and memories of their characters. Jacob, who is Minnesotan by birth, composes an appropriately eerie soundscape that bolsters and shades Ferver’s shifts in tone and character, while their continuous video projection weaves a visual narrative — the life of the mind — through recurring objects and scenes rendered in nervy sketches and slim slices of pages cut from books.
Memory and fantasy flicker in tarnished grayscale: empty windows yawn in quaint, boxy houses, dense forests give way to dark rivers and star-riddled skies, the pupil of an enormous eye becomes a full moon, flowers fall on a sexual awakening, a cigarette smolders in wait. Jacob’s purposeful cadences of silence and stillness lend depth to frenzied fugues and dreamlike departures — far more than a backdrop, their images fill the otherwise empty stage.
Amid this stark and shifting scene, Ferver is a live wire whose capacity to sustain tension with dramatic precision springs from an uncanny openness in body and voice. Their black and white gingham dress and sheer black apron evoke a darker shade of Americana while they clack, skip, or twirl on hard-heeled Victorian shoes, twice pounding out the rhythm of an arriving train. Such consonances of movement and words — Ferver speaks a near-continuous stream through the hour-long work—are striking in their clarity, landing with immediacy without edging into pantomimic tropes. Their compact, angular frame balances seething anxiety with necessary breath to allow minute gestural control, particularly in their splayed hands and gnarled fingers, and deft modulation between chilling monotones and jagged rhythms.
Throughout the work, Ferver builds suspense through a mix of dark foreboding and almost feral unpredictability, spiked with flashes of violence, gasps of intense eroticism, and near-vertical peaks of high camp (complete with dramatic spotlights). Meticulous descriptions paint pictures like containers — mapping out the streets and buildings of this town or that—that they methodically fill to overflowing with the fleshy mess of experience and its attendant psychological vortex. Their deconstructed storytelling leaves just enough space to fill in the blanks with affect and imagination while opening larger meditations on betrayal and abandonment, misogyny and queerness, revenge and regret, and always, ultimately, death.
With My Town, Ferver and Jacob strike consonant chords that echo across stretches of time, space, and character, layered and lingering as if under the firm, sensitive pressure of a sure foot on the damper pedal. Repetition and recurrence stretch across the work, serving to ground and destabilize in equal measure, often circling to land neatly as an unsettling speck of déjà vu. The bleak train tracks and impassive river, the bite of icy water around bare ankles, the manic flush and pounding heart at moments of rage and reckoning, the bitter haunting of trauma: such are the makings of these two — or any two — small American towns.
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