Mexican Day
Play Description
In 1948, Los Angeles Tribune reporter Hisaye Yamamoto puts her job at risk when she joins forces with civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin to desegregate Bimini Baths.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“Water is a vivid metaphor in Los Angeles. We live in a desert beside an ocean, an existence of simultaneous want and plenitude. Another, lesser-known water source inspires The Ballad of Bimini Baths, a trio of plays by local playwright Tom Jacobson. Bimini was a popular swimming and spa complex at the site of hot springs one block east of Vermont Avenue between 1st and 2nd streets, operated from 1903 to 1951. Jacobson makes this the nexus of a wide-ranging tale that pulls together events in LA history, some of which occurred at the baths, others not. His theme is sins in need of being washed away—racism as well as other moral failings. The intriguing result is being staged by three small theaters, all running different plays ranging from 55 minutes to 1½ hours. The final play is an inspiring tale of people working together to try to redeem the past and re-chart the future … Bimini, like many places in the early 20th century, was racially exclusive. People of color were admitted just one day a month, the day before the pools were drained and cleaned.” —Daryl H Miller, Los Angeles Times
“Only a playwright as daring and talented as Tom Jacobson could imagine and achieve a project as mind-blowing as his fascinating, informative Ballad of Bimini Baths trilogy. MEXICAN DAY is the most accessibly crowd-pleasing of the bunch.” —Stage Scene LA
“Highly effective. This is a thought-provoking and powerful play … humor alternates with seriousness.” —LA Splash
“Tom Jacobson’s insightful script intimately, intricately interweaves ethnicity, class, sexuality and more in his story depicting a landmark Civil Rights struggle in late 1940s Los Angeles.” —Hollywood Progressive
Author(s)
Tom JacobsonTom Jacobson has had more than 80 productions of his plays, including SPERM at Circle X Theatre Company, THE ORANGE GROVE at Playwrights Arena, and the award-winning BUNBURY, TAINTED BLOOD, OUROBOROS and THE FRIENDLY HOUR at The Road Theatre Company. THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAY premiered at The Theatre @ Boston Court and the New York International Fringe Festival (five Ovation Award nominations, four Los Angeles Drama Critics' Circle nominations, one GLAAD Award nomination, Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Production of a Play, PEN Center Award for Drama) and moved Off Broadway to Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. MAKING PARADISE: THE WEST HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL was produced by Cornerstone Theater Company (Critic's Choice in Back Stage West). He has been a co-literary manager of The Theatre @ Boston Court, a founding member of Playwrights Ink, and a board member of Cornerstone Theater Company and The Theatre @ Boston Court. Most recent productions include the world premieres of THE CHINESE MASSACRE (ANNOTATED) at Circle X and HOUSE OF THE RISING SON at Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA (Critic's Choice in Back Stage West and Los Angeles Times, nominated for a GLAAD Award and winner of two Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards). Film: PRAIRIE SONATA (based on THE FRIENDLY HOUR). Opera: HOPSCOTCH, commissioned by The Industry.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 9/24/2018 |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 9780881457926 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
MEXICAN DAY opened at Rogue Machine Theatre Company
in Los Angeles, CA, on 2 June 2018
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$15.00
Play Description
The play chronicles the selfless acts of Janusz Korczak, the teacher and director. Korczak strove to give the children of the Warsaw Ghetto a sense of normalcy despite the horrific conditions and eventually chose to leave with them for the Treblinka death camp.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (4 female, 9 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00
Play Description
It is a few years after the end of World War II. Billy Maitland, a young wheelchair-bound ex-Army Corporal is the sole remaining patient in a VA hospital when a new patient, Flight Commander Simon Trevelyan, arrives — accompanied by his American ex-WAAF wife. When Billy, who worships FDR, discovers that his new fellow-patient was a former pilot in the Royal Air Force, he insists the cynical and disillusioned Simon join him in reliving the war, with Billy pretending to be FDR and Simon pretending to be Winston Churchill. In a time before PTSD was identified and when treatment for the effects of the horrors of war were little understood, their doctor thinks this play-acting might help them recover from the physical and mental traumas of their combat experiences. As the two servicemen's extremely different personal and historical stories unfold, HOTEL VICTORY portrays the aftereffects of battle and contrasts war as it is experienced by the Grand Figures of history vs. the way it is experienced by the men and women they send into the fight.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
Play Description
Simone Weil, a French girl of Jewish extraction whose death in 1943 was caused primarily by self-imposed starvation, is the subject of this striking theatrical exploration into the nature of faith and spirituality. APPROACHING SIMONE gives fascinating insights into this extraordinary woman who was later canonized as a saint.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (6 female, 10 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
SOMEWHERE IN THE PACIFIC takes place on a troop ship at the end of World War II. The ship's captain is haunted by the death of his son in battle, and the young marines under his command are terrified and restless as they are stalked by an invisible enemy.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (9 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
WORLD SET FREE is the story of the top-secret race to produce the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Brilliantly eccentric Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi tell the story of the fevered work of a unique collection of scientists that were gathered at the University of Chicago in April of 1942. WORLD SET FREE explores the meeting place between the scientists' secret culture, the popular culture of the time, and a world on the brink of atomic power.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s LA RONDE, JITTERBUGGING: SCENES OF SEX IN A NEW SOCIETY is set in 1947. A cycle of brief sexual encounters in a seaside New England hotel begins with the seduction of a soldier by a whore and ends with the seduction of that whore by the mayor. The play contrasts the sadness of the manipulative liaisons with the surface optimism of period songs.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95
Play Description
Set against the chaotic aftermath of World War II, this play intimately explores the fragility of family relationships. In 1945, five years after being evacuated to Canada, 17-year-old Peter returns to London. His parents are now dead, and his three older sisters await his arrival.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
TWO SEPTEMBER is set in post-WWII Vietnam, when Ho Chi Minh had visions of a free country and a newly formed House UnAmerican Affairs Committee blacklisted a young, female American writer who believed in truth, justice, and a humane social order.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 75 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Chicago, 1940. In the first act, Thomas, a successful playwright, his brother, Hal, with his wife, Helen, and son, Tom, wait out a storm in the playwright’s luxurious apartment. The playwright proposes to write a play just for his brother’s wife. The next afternoon, still snowbound, Thomas, Hal, and Helen visit the wealthy Pflaum-Smythes upstairs, while their high-spirited daughter, Effi, attempts to make the acquaintance of Tom, the boy, downstairs. The adults descend to witness a reading of Thomas’s new play, a story very much like that of Hal and Helen running off to Tahiti years ago, only Tom and Effi rise to play the parts. In the second act, a week later, beginning in Hal and Helen’s similar, but much less expensive apartment, Helen returns to announce that she has the lead in Thomas’s new play. The family celebrates. Late that night, Helen, who has been drinking, reveals to Tom that the price for being cast was high, followed by a couple of other revelations leading to her midnight departures for Thomas’s. At Thomas’s, Effi makes an unscheduled appearance in one of her mother’s evening gowns to demand the right to sit in on the rehearsals of Thomas’s new play. Helen arrives with Hal in close pursuit. Thomas makes a grim announcement, and all leave. Thomas sits down to work on his new script, which is subsequently enacted before us as a play within a play until Thomas’s final spoken stage direction brings the lights down.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
This gem of a play evokes the days of youth and innocence as young Americans were being shipped off to World War II.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes