Puzzles of writing plays in L.A.: Tom Jacobson turns out brain-teasing scripts, as if life as a playwright weren't already super-complicated
LOS ANGELES - Churchgoer. Gymgoer. Fundraising executive. Devoted spouse, son and colleague.
This is the trickster of Los Angeles theater? My, but Tom Jacobson's still waters run deep.
He is, after all, the playwright who gathers Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle for an encounter with what might be a vampire or, even scarier, the embodiment of hidden desires ("Tainted Blood"); who turns an acting audition into a conduit for the ghosts of a ruinous 1914 same-sex vice sting ("The Twentieth-Century Way"); and who, in rhyming couplets, sails King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and a Yankee whaler off on a sociopolitical quest ("Sperm").
History, sexuality, religion and the transformative power of theater are but a few of the topics that he swirls together in plays that often are constructed like puzzles or that kaleidoscopically shift styles.
"I like the audience to have to work a little bit," he says.
