- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“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. A dizzying tapestry of literary and mythological vampire lore overlays Wilde’s own demons.” —Los Angeles Times
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.
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:
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–$15.95Play Description
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.
Production Info
Cast: 14 total (4 female, 10 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$19.95–$20.00Collection Description
This collection includes five long one-act plays: THE AWFUL TOOTH, BLASTED EVENT, DEAD WRONG, POTTY FAVORS, and SHE CAN’T BARE IT! Master Belle Époque farceur Georges Feydeau loosely based these brilliantly funny long one-acts on the failure of his own marriage. The plays, greatly admired in his time, were described by a prominent critic as “insane merriment, inextinguishable laughter.” With DEAD WRONG, the first play in the collection, Feydeau launched a new genre: the marital farce, the hell of couples. And “like the very great comic writers,” another critic noted, Feydeau “knows how to make the public laugh at his personal bitterness.” It was Feydeau himself who suggested that these five one-acts be collected under the title FROM MARRIAGE TO DIVORCE. This collection, which for the first time brings these plays together in English, honors that suggestion. Distinguished translator Laurence Senelick has taken care to preserve all of Feydeau’s stage directions as sure guides to staging the plays for maximum effect. DEAD WRONG: A husband and wife stay together by force of habit, their relationship based on nothing solid. The wife’s aggression and bitterness and the husband’s selfishness and irresponsibility are revealed, and their ferocious animosity unleashes such powerful comedy that it obscures the underlying darkness. POTTY FAVORS: Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing. SHE CAN’T BARE IT!: What to do about a wife going around the apartment in her nightie until lunchtime? BLASTED EVENT: Trapped in a misalliance, a husband is set upon by his wife, his in-laws, and the midwife. THE AWFUL TOOTH was the last new play of Feydeau to be produced in his lifetime, and its dentist’s chair offers a dose of sadistic hilarity. As translator Laurence Senelick notes, “Feydeau may be to dentists what Molière was to doctors.”
Plays in This Collection
Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Set in a country weighed down by political, ideological and spiritual stagnation, Chekhov's compelling early play is rooted in the revolutionary atmosphere of Russia at the turn of the 20th century.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A laugh-out-loud parody par excellence of Shakespeare's tragedies. Wickedly whimsical, delightfully devious, with six blended tragedies, thirty-one parts, forty location changes and one enormous sword-swinging battle of twenty thousand men.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, A DYBBUK recounts the tale of a wealthy man’s daughter possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved.
Production Info
Cast: 18 total (5 female, 13 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$100.00Play Description
In Eric Overmyer’s hilarious send-up of private-eye pulp fiction, Shrimp Bucket and his brother, Gut, are stealing the sexy Dolores Con Leche’s dreams. It’s Taxi’s task to find out why. From the ubiquitous fog to the cheap bedrooms at Heartbreak Hotel to Con Leche’s legs, which are described as “gams that could raise goose flesh on a tossed salad,” IN A PIG’S VALISE pokes fun at and pays homage to the hardboiled detective novels we all know and love.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Richard Nelson’s critically lauded adaptation of Strindberg’s classic, in which a power struggle between husband and wife leads to devastating consequences.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A groundbreaking masterpiece of the modern theatre. The play tells the tale of a poor soldier, a barber in the army, who is overwhelmed by the military and forced to become a human guinea pig for quasi-medical research. Consumed by jealousy over his lover’s infidelity, Woyzeck is driven to despair, to madness, and to murder. Poignant and grotesque, insightful and all-too-human, the play broke every theatrical mold of its time, paving the way for theatre as we know it today.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (4 female, 12 male, doubling, bit parts, children, extras)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95Play Description
In Strindberg’s classic, Miss Julie, the daughter of a powerful count, enters into a dangerously flirtatious relationship with a footman on her father’s estate. The critics have described Richard Nelson’s adaptation as “tight, sharp, idiomatic.”
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Ibsen’s 1881 masterpiece finds a fresh interpretation in Anthony Clarvoe’s taut adaptation in which a woman has to face her legacy of religious and sexual repression when her grown son comes home to tell her that he has an incurable sexually transmitted disease and asks her to help him die with dignity.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Journalist Dick Hunter sets out to document the slums of 1890's New York where he discovers harrowing conditions of poverty and abuse.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes