The play adapts one of Dennis Cooper’s novels, which was inspired by the story of American serial killer Dean Corll. With the help of two teenage boys (David Brooks and his lover Wayne Henley), he killed more than twenty boys in Texas in the 1970s. The narration is not exactly faithful to reality. Instead, it retraces the events from the point of view of David Brooks – one of the two adolescents and the only survivor of the trio. While in prison, he replays the events using hand-puppets, and he faces the ghosts of his past. The puppets allow for the staging of the gory, horrifying and perverted violence of the text. The puppeteer is both the protagonist and the narrator. David Brooks handles the puppets and lends them his voice, while also using his body as a puppet booth (corps-castelet; that is, literally, body-booth). His audience is mostly made up of psychology students from a local university. As he vacillates between the need to tell his story and the need to experience it again in a schizophrenic way, Brooks’ puppet show is interrupted twice by narrative episodes, which are read from a fanzine by the audience. Brooks’ performer (Jonathan Capdevielle) acts in a more and more internalised way, until he stops moving the puppets in the last scene, although he starts using ventriloquism: the puppets still speak, but their voices do not seem to come out of David’s body. As announced in the introduction to the show, Jerk seems to combine three plays by stage director Gisèle Vienne: I Apologize, Une belle enfant blonde and Kindertotenlieder.

The puppeteer is an inmate. He plays his puppet show for an audience of psychology students who have come to hear him relate his autobiographical story. He introduces the characters: Dean’s puppet, Wayne’s puppet, and the puppets of several dead boys. He also plays his own role, that of David. David and Wayne are a teenage couple. Dean is older than them. In their house, they talk of multiple murders they committed together: in the cave, the victims were killed by Dean, with the help of Wayne, after having been sexually assaulted, tortured and mutilated. The crimes were recorded on camera by David. The series of murders goes on until the murder of Jamie – a boy Wayne was in love with. Wayne is blinded by rage and kills Dean. David suggests that they put an end to the killing spree. Wayne agrees in a first time. But when he meets Brad, another boy, and engages in an erotic game at the end of which he takes Dean’s place: he tortures Brad until he kills him. After the murder, David kills Wayne during a panic attack. Then he calls the police and confesses to his crimes.