
ORIGINAL WORK
ORIGINAL WORK




ANOTHER HORATIO ALGER STORY
Fresh Fruit Festival
In an inner-city classroom, a teacher tries to save an at-risk student by introducing him to American novelist, Horatio Alger, Jr. As the play moves across two worlds—urban America today and 19th-century New York—the conflict between fact and fiction leads to hard lessons about the American dream and the myth that we can all pull ourselves self up by our bootstraps.
Learn more at New Play Exchange




Stylishly directed by Jason Jacobs, who co-conceived the project with dramaturg Jamee Freedus, the show is flawlessly paced and brought to vivid life by the talented ensemble cast."
TheaterMania
Director Jason Jacobs... keeps the evening bouncing along and guides the performers well through the play's final, ironic moments."
Backstage
BALD DIVA!
Queer-Eyed boys get an absurdist makeover a la Eugene Ionesco in this tragic spectacle of la vie Chelsea, featuring sizzling firemen, probing detectives, saucy maids, steamroom escapades, provocative party games, low-rent musical numbers on fabulous cardboard sets, piping-hot celebrity dish, the latest fashion trends and beauty secrets, narrow escapes of reality, death-defying mental acrobatics and more Divas than you can shake your stick at!




An evening of Jewishly inflected, queer songs brings Weimar Germany back to life with humor and music."
Tablet
Out of this minimal landscape, director Jason Jacobs creates a vibrant, small-scale panorama with his precise staging. Lawrence glides around, often stands still totally, but remains mesmerizing due to Jacobs’ command of visual technique."
TheatreScene.net
a beautifully realized evocation of a club in Germany in the ‘30s ... a thrilling reminder of the power and strength of cabaret at its best.”
NitelifeExchange.com
LAVENDER SONGS
by Jeremy Lawrence
Pangea
2008 Bistro Award Winner!
Originally produced in 2008 and revised in 2016 in response to the Trump ascendency, this cabaret theatre piece had an extended run at Pangea. Featuring songs originally written and performed by queer aertists in Weimar-era Berlin (with new English lyrics by Jeremy), the piece was based on an evening created by Alan Lareau for the U.S. Holocaust Museum om Washington DC.




Jason Jacobs book is heartbreaking and touching"
- TimesSquareChronicles.com
a nuanced story and a tour de force performance"
- FrontRowCenter.com
a fine tuned, superbly crafted piece of theatre"
- Theatre Reviews Limited
MISS BLANCHE TELLS IT ALL
Jason Jacobs: Book & Lyrics
Matthew C. Pritchard: Music & Lyrics
You never know a person 'til you walk in her heels.
1969 New Orleans: It’s standing room only at The Golden Lantern. The band strikes up and begins to play the opening number for “Miss Blanche”, the hottest drag act in the Quarter — but instead, a fiery young man takes the stage. With the aid of a mysterious wardrobe trunk, he explores clues of his family’s past, sings songs about his own life, and sets the course for a new future.
Inspired by the imagination of Tennessee Williams, this intimate and seductive musical takes us on one man’s journey of desire, self-expression and liberation.
Miss Blanche Tells It All (Official Website)




An afternoon of pleasantries quickly turns into a boiling teakettle of tension...the ending of the play is subtle and numbingly powerful."
Letters From the Mezz
I want the audience to look at the Founding Fathers through a lens that includes class, race and gender."
Call Me Adam
The REAL First Ladies of Washington City give the dish on the 1801 Election."
MY FIRST LADY
by David Koteles
Metropolitan Playhouse
Presented as part of the Metropolitan Playhouse Founders Festival, My First Lady takes a funny and unexpected turn towards a battle of race, class, and gender in the new American republic when First Ladies Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and Thomas Jefferson’s daughters gather for a "friendly" tea. The gloves come off when Jefferson's enslaved mistress Sally Hemmings claims her rightful place at the table.




Cousin and Jacobs’s aim is to rescue the work from all its accumulated baggage ...and to present Stowe’s — and Aiken’s — story center-stage. This they do, thanks to a knock-out student cast, without the slightest hint of irony or contemporary shading"
Pittsburgh City Paper
Jason Jacobs joins the cocktail conversation on ‘Burgh Vivant and discusses his collaboration with Tomé Cousin in adapting Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin"
Burgh Vivant
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
co-adapted with Tome' Cousin, with original music by Douglas Levine.
(Based on the play by George Aiken and the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe.)
One of the most popular American plays from 1852 into the 1920s, it unfolds like our own, rough Shakespearean play: a sprawling epic that dramatizes a long, dark moment in our history. Tome and I began working on our adaptation as part of the Lincoln Center Directors Lab. We both felt the play's history had become misunderstood, and the term "Uncle Tom" had become an epithet that reduced the original character to a stereotype of aquiescence and betrayal of his own people. Our adaptation aims to restore Uncle Tom's name and re-envsion his story as one of self-assertion, faith, and human dignity.