THE BONEYARD 

HELL MOUTH at the Road Theatre Company

Los Angeles wunderkind playwright Tom Jacobson’s newest and most idiosyncratic work, now world premiering at the stalwart Road Theatre, chronicles a fascinating descent into the divine—and the damned.

For 35 prolific years the Road, under the fiercely dedicated leadership of founder and artistic director Taylor Gilbert, has been a sanctuary for championing and presenting only ambitious new works, but Jacobson’s Hell Mouth is a venture courageously taken on even beyond that well-earned mantle. It is a work awash in a singular, ultimately haunting scale as it delves into a young man named Tim (Danny Lee Gomez), whose name is surely intentionally only one vowel away from the author’s own for a reason. Jacobson, a master of blending meticulous historical research with the surreal, has this time out clearly crafted his most personal work, a piece that feels less like a play and more like an incantation.

The story is described as a blend of art history and heretical theology, juxtaposed with being a heart-wrenching family drama. In it, Tim is caught between two worlds: his Lutheran-austere upbringing and—at first glance, at least—sheltered Oklahoman mother Lois and his dying father Russell (Gilbert and Tony Abatemarco) and a pseudo-sophisticated and ridiculously pretentious Hancock Park fashion icon named Spencer (also played by Abatemarco in one of the play’s most challenging narrative obstacles) who may just be owner of a previously unknown painting of Judas by Caravaggio. It shouldn’t take anyone who’s been around LA a few decades to realize Spencer is based on the lategreat and rather charmingly monstrous Mr. Blackwell, someone with whom both Jacobson and Yours Truly worked and knew personally, perhaps rather too well.

Employed as an acquisitions manager for a tony LA art museum (Jacobson worked for years as a fundraiser for LACMA), Tim struggles to reconcile his humble midwestern roots with the extreme wealth and ostentatiousness of the LA art world—there’s even a sly plot point about his worrying his parka-clad mother might just land on Spencer’s annual “Worst Dressed” list.   

The play is described as having “blood, profanity, and meta-commentary,” which fits perfectly with the high-intensity, almost industrial energy that makes this playwright’s work so unique. It deals with hidden secrets, intense transformations, and the pressure of being caught between two different lives.  

Set against a backdrop where the veil between the mundane and the macabre is dangerously thin, Hell Mouth follows Tim and his ultra-sophisticated but hardened former New Yawk-er fine art broker Samara (again played by Gilbert) as they navigate their career-making task of getting Spencer to donate his possibly historically important canvas to the museum. His journey quite literally takes him from LA to Oklahoma to Provence, France to try to unearth details about Caravaggio’s mysterious and never substantiated death—and perhaps, at least in the hallucinations Tim begins to suffer, on to a metaphorical and possibly even literal visit to the Valley of Hell itself.

The script is a dense thicket of language, rich with wit, and chockful of existential dread. Jacobson doesn’t only demand a lot from his actors, he asks a lot of his audience as well, refusing to hand over easy answers and instead layering the plot with thematic questions about redemption, legacy, and the literal and figurative pits we flawed humans tend to dig for ourselves.

Having myself been closely connected not only with Blackwell—whom I personally befriended bigtime while for several years editing his weekly column in the Tolucan Times and then taking it and him along with me in the early 90s when I moved on to be editor of the now defunct Beverly Hills Post—but Tom and his husband Ramone Munoz have also been pals almost as long. His up-until now unproduced Hell Mouth has been on my radar for some time, although I just learned from him opening weekend at the Road that he actually wrote it 18 years ago after the death of his own father.

One of the reasons the play remained in a drawer so long was the intense difficulties of presenting it, especially as the actors playing the parents and LA art-fashion figures must switch identities, as well as clothes and wigs, at lightning speed. Luckily, the Road secured the collaboration of one of the company’s finest and most imaginative directors of past successes Ann Hearn Tobolowsky who, along with a crackerjack design and creative team, has finished the puzzle, managing to make the intimate Road space feel cavernous and claustrophobic at the same time.

The staging leans heavily into the supernatural requirements of the text without ever veering into camp. The visual palette is striking, with Mark Mendleson’s austere yet versatile and highly modern set utilizing deep dark red shadows and sharp, angular light designed by Derrick McDaniel that easily suggests the encroaching darkness of the story’s titular gateway to Hell itself. Add in Nicholas Santiago’s masterful video projections, a combination evoking something between Hieronymus Bosch and the real-life images of works by Caravaggio himself, and the result is a masterclass in mood over literalism.

While the script is undeniably wordy, Tobolowsky’s direction keeps the energy taut, ensuring the philosophical debates never stall the forward momentum of the plot. The success of any Jacobson play always rests on its actors’ ability to handle rhythmic, heightened dialogue without losing the human pulse beneath it.

In this premiere, Gomez delivers a grounded, soulful performance that acts as a necessary anchor for the play’s more complex elements, while the undeniably arresting chemistry between veteran thespians Gilbert and Abatemarco provides the emotional stakes needed to make the play’s cosmic consequences feel personal.

Hell Mouth is undeniably a challenging, rewarding piece of theatre that commands its audience to work almost as hard as its performers. That Tobolowsky and her team have successfully found a clear pathway to do just that perfectly reaffirms Tom Jacobson’s status as one of the most erudite, gifted, and daring playwrights of our time. It isn’t merely a story; it’s a sensory experience that lingers long after the final blackout. For those who prefer their theatre with a side of intellectual vertigo, this is an essential sit.

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