Pulled from the stomach of a whale, an American whaler is bleached blind and becomes a modern Tiresias in the court of Louis XVI. He seduces Marie Antoinette and sets the king on a path to destroy France and ultimately humankind. A tragicomedy in rhymed couplets.
"SPERM is Tom Jacobson's adaptation of Jacques Miroir's 18th-century play CACHALOT. Right - just try to find any play called CACHALOT or a French scribe named Miroir. Jacobson and his American Whaler central character both make a lot of stuff up in Jacobson's new verse play, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Yet in their fictitious nonsense lie hidden truths, as applicable to our times as any." -Steven Leigh Morris, L A Weekly
"In a refreshingly original and imaginative debut ... Tom Jacobson's SPERM combines the literary D N A of 18th-century French drama with postmodern irony to spawn a whale of a tale (literally - the title refers to the species of leviathans that have loomed large in symbolic portent since Jonah's night sea journey). History, mythology, poetry and scatological puns collide with dazzling ingenuity in Jacobson's quirky seriocomic gem, composed entirely in rhyming iambic pentameter. Clearly billed as an 'adaptation' of a supposed subversive historical text (CACHALOT by Jacques Miroir), SPERM explores the twilight of the French monarchy as it tries to stem the rising tide of republicanism among the populace. Amid the intrigues at pre-revolutionary Versailles arrives Richard, a fair-spoken American seaman who accepts a royal invitation to instruct the French in the ways of whaling." -Philip Brandes, Los Angeles Times
