Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle use logic and religion to fend off a seductive vampire in this fang-in-cheek comedy/thriller. "Jacobson's clever play balances repressed Victorian sexuality, historical anecdote, over-the-top hilarity and vampire melodrama into an intoxicating brew." -L A Weekly "Tom Jacobson's clever satiric pastiche pits Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle against the undead. Drawing on the three writers' shared fascination with the occult, Jacobson assembles them at Wilde's Irish estate for a demonstration by a sinister Indian mesmerist....

Two American couples get caught in a chronological palindrome on a trip to Italy. Stigmata, alchemy, adultery, and St. Catherine of Siena's severed head plague a nun and a minister in this circular love story that is a comedy if performed forward and a tragedy if performed backward. "Critic's choice ... Either direction's a rewarding trip, the reversible OUROBOROS provides two distinctive experiences. Only the most skillful and meticulous construction could allow Tom Jacobson's love story involving the repeatedly intersecting spiritual quests of two American couples - each traveling through...

What if Blanche Dubois didn't go crazy? Or the Three Sisters actually made it to Moscow? When he discovers he's fictitious, a never-seen character in an Oscar Wilde play, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo's never-seen obsession from ROMEO AND JULIET. Together they infiltrate and alter classic literature, including giving ROMEO AND JULIET a happy ending. "In essaying a 'play for trivial people, ' Tom Jacobson has delivered a seriously clever meta-theatrical comedy and an unexpectedly moving ode to the mysterious powers of art and love in BUNBURY ... Jacobson's antic yet humane wit...

Based on the actual minutes of a women's club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the '30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium. "Tom Jacobson has paid exemplary homage to real-life American heroes from a less jaded period in our history, using transcripts of minutes from a rural South Dakotan women's club that gathered monthly from 1934 through 2004, when the last two survivors begin to fade. As with other of Jacobson's plays (BUNBURY, SPERM, OUROBOROS), the...

When Trent brings Felix home to New Orleans to meet his father and homophobic grandfather, the family's demons come slithering into the light. Watchful ghosts, sinister hustlers, and a myriad of parasites lead Felix on a Southern Gothic journey to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. "Tom Jacobson's galvanic drama HOUSE OF THE RISING SON, boasts some of his trademark qualities, such as shrewd scientific metaphors and astute ruminations on social issues. Those heady ideas are embellished here with the sublime pleasures of a well-spun yarn chock-full of surprises. Equal parts ghost story and unorthodox...

The true story of two actors who hired themselves out to the Long Beach Police Department in 1914 to entrap "social vagrants" in public restrooms. Thirty-one men were arrested, and the ensuing scandal led to an ordinance against "oral sodomy" in California. "Tom Jacobson's exceptional THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAY ... is meta-theatre - dense and accurate and mysterious. While obviously influenced by Genet and Stoppard - the costuming metaphor will remind you of Genet's THE MAIDS and aspects of Stoppard's JUMPERS - Jacobson is working a distinctly American vernacular, and his voice is ultimately...

Based on historical incident, the play chronicles the first race riot in Los Angeles history: the 1871 lynching of 18 Chinese men by a mob of 500 "people from all nations." Tom Jacobson's fiercely theatrical retelling brings to light the remarkable, culturally diverse 19th-century Wild West town that exploded into the metropolis we know today. "THE CHINESE MASSACRE (ANNOTATED), Tom Jacobson's rousing new play, is like a fun day at Disneyland. Jacobson chronicles the 1871 lynching of 18 Chinese men by a mixed-race mob, historically considered to be Los Angeles's first race riot. Actors break...

Christopher Marlowe, sixteenth-century author, was murdered at the age of 29. This tragicomedy speculates that his death was tied to his scandalous play about the relationship between Jesus and the disciple John. "Playwright Tom Jacobson is a linguistic gadfly. Often, you are tickled by him. Occasionally you are bedeviled by him. Once or twice, you just want to swat him. Linguistic pyrotechnics explode in Jacobson's period verse drama THE BELOVED DISCIPLE. Little is known of Marlowe's life. It is certain that he was an atheistic iconoclast whose heretical views placed him in constant danger...

Pulled from the stomach of a whale, an American whaler is bleached blind and becomes a modern Tiresias in the court of Louis XVI. He seduces Marie Antoinette and sets the king on a path to destroy France and ultimately humankind. A tragicomedy in rhymed couplets. "SPERM is Tom Jacobson's adaptation of Jacques Miroir's 18th-century play CACHALOT. Right - just try to find any play called CACHALOT or a French scribe named Miroir. Jacobson and his American Whaler central character both make a lot of stuff up in Jacobson's new verse play, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Yet in...