Long-buried secrets of power, passion, and perversion propel Plunge, the first installment of Tom Jacobson’s concurrently running Bimini Baths Trilogy, as provocative a World Premiere play as you’re likely to experience any time soon.

 The year is 1918 and an elegantly tuxedoed Everett Carroll Maxwell (Gary Patent), the 30something curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and Art is welcoming guests to an event celebrating the donation of property soon to become the Otis Art Institute when he makes the acquaintance of freshly arrived Oklahoma priest Edward Reynolds (Dan Via), ten years his senior, and when conversation of a more intimate nature seems warranted by their immediate affinity, Everett suggests they sample the delights offered by Bimini Baths, whose private tubs offer a “thorough cleansing” and perhaps more.

Audiences can be excused for assuming Plunge holds in store an evening of sex between consenting adults, especially when Everett treats Edward to a full-frontal head-to-toe view of his tantalizingly toned physique before donning the wrestling singlet-style swimwear that was the fashion till the 1930s.

 What playwright Jacobson delivers, instead, is something a good deal more complex as the two men discover in each other kindred spirits sharing the same sexual proclivities and similar run-ins with the law though with decidedly different outcomes.

 Stand advised that Plunge requires considerably more concentration and deductive skills than your average two-hander as its two superb stars play not only a pair of real-life characters whose scandals made the headlines a century or more ago, though not necessarily in the same decade, but bath attendants of assorted nationalities and race, an English traveling salesman, a pair of foreign-born fathers, and a trio of barely pubescent boys, one of whom will become the (fictional) adult protagonist of Jacobson’s 1939-set Tar and 1948’s Mexican Day.

 Under Matthew McCray’s electrifying direction, Patent and Via deliver a baker’s dozen commanding, finely delineated performances between them, segueing seamlessly from character to character, age to age, and accent to accent, aided by Michael Mullen’s terrific, quick-change early-20th-century costumes and by the enveloping, evocative, surrealism-enhancing contributions of scenic designer Michael Fitzgerald, lighting designer Alexander Le Valliant Freer, video designer McCray, and sound designer David B. Marling.

Daphne Kinard is stage manager. Art direction is by Aidan Fiorito.

As both stand-alone production and one certain to inspire interest in following Mexican-American immigrant Zenobio Remedios’s journey from childhood to his thirties and forties in The Bimini Baths Trilogy’s concluding chapters, Plunge will have you on the edge of your seat from its intriguing start to its heart-rending finish.

Son of Semele Theatre, 3301 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles.
www.sonofsemele.org

–Steven Stanley
June 12, 2018
Photos: Son Of Semele

Tags: Bimini Baths, Los Angeles Theater Review, Son Of Semele, Tom Jacobson