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Rich in swagger, invention, mischief and heat…the crispness and bite of Barbagallo's text is, recursively, a love letter to writing itself.
— Time Out NY
The Barry Years includes three plays from writer-director-performer Jess Barbagallo, who has shaped an entire generation of New York theater with his tender haywire wit. My Old Man and Other Stories follows Barry—a forlorn Tom Waits impersonator with a water-stained floor and romance-induced insomnia—through a sequence of episodic scenes featuring emotional incompetents seeking love without compromise. An homage to small-town decay and reduced expectations, My Old Man and Other Stories is at once lambent with unrequited longing and crisp as the mechanics of life.
Barry returns in Weekend at Barry’s/Lesbian Lighthouse, a pair of back-to-back episodes of television-as-theater, the second knocked-off from (knocked up by?) the first. Now a forty-something cultural worker whose career-averse lifestyle has led him to a personal and professional dead end, Barry bounces between questionable jobs and even more questionable lovers. In language that is winking, layered, [and] dazzling
(Helen Shaw, Vulture), Barbagallo delivers a devastatingly precise and zany send-up of the contemporary art world that teeters on that silver highwire between despair and hilarity.
Weekend at Barry's: Greatest Hits—featuring Barry but narrated by Biv, your resident narrator, dreamer, and shit-starter—is kind of like a spin-off. And also a bunch of short stories. Anyway, it asks us to reexamine our formalities,
in Biv's words. Learning to love in this way is a form of radicalism because it means that perverse love—that is the love we do against the structures that seek to organize us in brutality—is the only love.
A whippet-fast farce about life in the New York arts economy…a sense of dazed delight, as if I’d surfed onto a channel I didn’t know existed but, somehow, starred all the people that I knew.
—Helen Shaw, Vulture
Poetic and strange, shining unexpected light on the real, sad ways that we often miss one another, even as we suffer in close proximity…the isolation and little ways that we come together that it shows—it all reminded me too much of my own life.
—Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, CultureBot
Reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, Barbagallo has a facility for comedy…Good natured and fitfully entertaining.
—TheaterScene.Net
Jess Barbagallo is a theater artist, teacher, and writer based in New York City. His work has been presented at Dixon Place, La MaMa, BAX, New Ohio Theater, the Poetry Project, Performance Space New York, Incubator Arts Project, New York University, The Brick, Abrons Arts Center, The Park Avenue Armory (studio presentation: Prelude 2023), and Luv Story Bar. Directing credits include Pony (Portland Theater Festival), It’s That Time of the Month (Soho Rep.), and The Last Podcast on Earth (The Tank). He has published writing in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, them, Movement Research Journal, The Cincinnati Review, 53rd State Press, and Spectrum Literary Journal. He has acted in many things, most recently Misha Brooks’ adaptation of Sophocles’ Antigone (The Barn at Lee). With producer/performer John Hoobyar, he co-curated Prelude 2024, an experimental theater festival, at the Martin E. Segal Center of the CUNY Graduate Center. He was recently awarded a 2025 New York State Council on the Arts grant to continue development of his short story collection Cherry and The Others.