Two storied playwrights and a relative newcomer make for must-see theatricality

“BRITANNICUS” by KEITH IAN POLAKOFF

Considering that across-town theaters are staging plays by Nobel literature laureates and pillars of European drama, it’s got be a bit humbling for Tom Jacobson to see his name in lights on Long Beach Playhouse’s marquee.

But while Harold Pinter and Jean Racine warrant lengthy encyclopedia entries and rigorous academic study—and productions elsewhere in Long Beach—the most entertaining and intelligent play in this city this weekend might belong to Jacobson, a Los Angeles-based playwright who’s yet to receive his first full-fledged professional production.

Jacobson’s 2004 play Bunbury is an ingenious comic romp that tosses a meaty bone to two of the most emaciated characters (in terms of stage time and lines) in theatrical history: Bunbury, the unseen cohort of Algernon, a central character in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; and Rosalind, the equally unseen maiden whom Romeo ditches for Juliet.

In Jacobson’s gleefully illogical world, Bunbury and Rosalind are quite alive. Their frustration at being exiled to the margins of their respective stories leads them to unwittingly create a happy ending for R&J. That sparks a literary chain reaction across the ages, with a range of major works now far more cheerful, such as Poe’s raven transformed into a peacock optimistically chirping “anytime.”

It’s a smartly written piece of meta-theater that channels Shakespearean verse, Wilde’s wittily sarcastic bons mots and, most apparently, the literary savoir fair of Tom Stoppard, whose Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Jacobson admits, definitely inspired his free-wheeling reimagination of literary history.

But what’s it all mean?

“It’s pretty much the same message as Horton Hears a Who!” says Jacobson, the literary manager of one of Los Angeles’ top equity-waiver theaters, the Theatre @ Boston Court. “That a person is a person, no matter how small they are.”

While Jacobson invites viewers to reimagine literary history, Pinter and Racine are literary history.

Pinter helped usher in the so-called theatre of the absurd in the late ’50s en route to a formidable 20-year string of menacing, ambiguous plays that questioned the meaning and utility of human language and memory. He took a sharp left turn in the ’80s into political theater, and time hasn’t tempered his politics.

The two Pinter plays staged by the Garage Theatre as part of “The Pinter Project” are earlier works, so the politics aren’t overt. But everything Pinter has written is political to some degree. The Lover is sexual politics at its most ambiguous and perverse, while the darkly comic The Dumb Waiter is, in part, a metaphor for how apparently free societies can justify the most atrocious of crimes.

Rounding out the city’s impressive troika of highly literate plays is California Repertory Company’s production of 17th century French playwright Jean Racine’s Britannicus. Racine doesn’t get the props of his contemporary Moliere, mostly because his plays are far more formal than funny, but Racine is often cited as an equal of Shakespeare and Lorca in his brilliant use of verse in classical tragedy.

His play is about the Roman Emperor Nero’s obsessive quest of power, but this Britannicus is a new adaptation by John Rafter Lee, so we’ll have to wait to see which deceitful leader—and the decline of which empire—people will be thinking about as they leave the theater.

BUNBURY LONG BEACH PLAYHOUSE | STUDIO THEATRE | 5021 E ANAHEIM ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | 562.494.1014 | LBPH.COM | FRI-SAT 8PM | ALSO MAY 18&25 2PM | $12-22 | THROUGH MAY 31 | THE PINTER PROJECT THE GARAGE THEATRE | 251 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90813 | 562.433.8337 | THEGARAGETHEATRE.ORG | THURS-SAT 8PM | $12-15 | THROUGH MAY 17 | BRITANNICUS CAL REP AT THE ARMORY | 854 E SEVENTH ST | LONG BEACH 90813 | 562.985.5526 | CALREP.ORG | WED-THURS&TUES 7PM | FRI-SAT 8PM (NO SHOWS THIS WEEKEND) | $15-20 | THROUGH MAY 17

Tags: art, cal rep, jacobson, Long Beach, Long Beach Playhouse, pinter, plays, racine, the garage theatre, Theater