three Home Runs
KANFER, STEFAN
On Stage Three Home Runs By Stefan Kanfer In a Parisian suburb, a dinner engagement obeys both the letter and the spirit of Murphy's Law: Everything that can go wrong will go wrong. The host...
...The intermissionless production at the Circle in the Square Theater shows the dinner party and the people unraveling in three views of the same event...
...The two themes are not as separate as they seem...
...Similarly, some of the peripheral roles, notably two Hispanic athletes, Martinez and Rod-riguez, (Robert M. Jimenez and Gene Gabriel) are little more than caricatures—just the sort of two dimensional portraits that homosexuals would object to if they were similarly shortchanged onstage...
...The population in and around the pond is composed of birds, mice, turtles and squirrels, admirably played by Vlastnik, Danielle Ferland and Jennifer Gambatese...
...Hubert: My morality is not dictated by distance...
...Hubert:There's very little competition...
...As the scientists and the lawyer coldly measure each other, and speculate about the paltriness of humankind in the galaxy, she finds the courage to say: "I don't agree at all that man is such an insignificant part of the universe...
...The French make their mistakes in the political arena, not in the kitchen...
...The first to speak his mind is a hillbilly relief pitcher, Shane Mungiti (Frederick Weiler), who complains publicly that in New York he is compelled to associate with "the gooks and the spies and the coons and like that...
...Jess Goldstein's costumes are major league...
...that will have to do...
...Still, she has a point...
...There is nothing edible in the house but boxes of Cheezits and some chocolate-covered ladyfingers...
...Frog, naturally, is lithe and graceful in his outfit, and basks before admiring crowds of animals...
...My family and I were summering by a lake in Vermont," she recalls...
...He is also a manipulative snob, a boor and a lech who invites Sonia to lunch the instant Henry and Inez leave the room to look at the now sleeping child...
...All these threes and multiples of threes, calling attention to the game's noble equality...
...Who knows...
...In the second, voices are a little gentler...
...Henry, it turns out, is on the verge of a breakdown...
...Sonia: I said arrogant...
...In this first-rate production, the women are the strongest members of the quartet...
...In the theater words are the main component, the equivalent of notes in a musical composition...
...Sonia: You're not ashamed...
...This is a show for the ages—the ages between four and nine, and those who like to see their children and grandchildren beam with delight...
...Hubert: Well done, much more subtle...
...there are several shower scenes, and the naked eye of the audience is matched by the nudity of the actors...
...Now A Year With Frog and Toad is at Cort Theater, where it deserves a long life...
...Take Me Out is a play about the love that dare not speak its game...
...Six feet away from your wife...
...Toad (LinnBaker) is terrified of the supernatural...
...Indeed, he expands their vocabulary in a Country and Western number: "I'm carrying a most important letter/ a letter that was written by Frog/I'm traveling so fast/ I'm assuming you're aghast/ Or at the very least you are agog...
...Mason Marzac (Denis O'Hare), Darren's new business manager, is similarly compassionate—with a reason that goes beyond the spirit of fair play...
...The Lobel book was an overnight success and prompted three classic sequels: Frog and Toad Are Friends, Frog and Toad Together, and Frog and Toad AII Year...
...Hunt, an Academy Award actress (As Good As It Gets), is every bit as effective onstage as on film...
...Playwright Richard Greenberg has written a schizoid drama, half special pleading for those who have emerged from the closet, half homage to professional baseball and its timeless history, legendary athletes and mathematical esthetics...
...Marzac—dubbed "Mars" by Darren— is a specialist in numbers...
...After discussing the meaning of life with a deeply religious ballplayer, Davey Battle (Kevin Carroll), Lemming impulsively tells the press he is gay...
...Yet not all of Darren's teammates and associates are as thick as Mungiti...
...The game begins in the spring, when everything begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone...
...In a play, words are parentheses to the silences...
...As Darren, Daniel Sunjata offers an ideal combination of athleticism, arrogance and vulnerability...
...The child was enchanted with the pair, and remained so even after she grew up, chose the career of stage designer, married and became a mother...
...Spiner radiates intelligence, without displaying the animal magnetism of a professional charmer and compulsive seducer...
...Sonia is a lawyer, bitterly aware that she is more successful than her husband, and that she always will be...
...one frown and it goes into a tailspin...
...As they move through the four seasons, the friends speak of each other fondly but realistically...
...Scott Pask's set design manages to evoke the green fields of the summer game as well as the claustrophobia of the locker room...
...He immersed himself in the lore and vocabulary of the game, and eventually composed the love letter he called Take Me Out...
...The flatisamess, and both of them are in their underwear when the doorbell rings...
...Sonia: What is it dictated by...
...The change in character is too abrupt to be credible, an editorial cartoon crayoned on a bright baseball poster...
...Too many contemporary plays are prolix, simply because the playwright feels the need to spell out details of character that are best revealed rather than spoken...
...our time may be fleeting, but we're not insignificant...
...Another thing I like is the home-run trot...
...The one hope for salvation is the publication of his long-awaited paper on cosmology, if only someone can help him find a publisher...
...Together they celebrate spring, summer, fall, and winter, augmented by a close-harmony Noel by the principals:"Sure it scold, but we've hot chocolate/ And a fire burning away/ By the fire see the clock lit/ Now it's almost Christmas Day...
...A prominent academic, Hubert is a member of the French Scientific Academy...
...He is also the playwright'salterego...
...They enlisted the talents of Robert and Willie Reale, brothers who wrote the music, book and lyrics...
...Her husband is the experienced Broadway and film actor Mark Linn-Baker...
...The group then workshopped their show Off-Broadway...
...She convinced him that the two creatures might make ideal protagonists in a Broadway musical for the most neglected minority group in New York, the post-kindergarten crowd...
...Hubert:Ashamed...
...We're the ones who gave it a name, us, man, we're the ones who provided this labyrinth with black holes and dead stars, with infinity and eternity, with things that no one can see...
...But gradually, as he learns the subject of baseball, rule by rule, he comes to accept, and to talk about, his own status, step by step...
...Predictably, shock waves hit the clubhouse, the manager (Joe Lisi), the fans, and, eventually, the entire city of New York...
...IN 1970, the late Arnold Lobel published a children's book entitled Days With Frog and Toad...
...They may stretch back to the days of Abner Doubleday...
...One day I happened to turn on the television, and it was the World Series, and it was riveting...
...Silences are like the instructions on tempo and style: vital, yet secondary...
...The self-described nonathletic Greenberg suddenly found himself thunderstruck by baseball in 1998, at the age of 38...
...Over the course of the next several hours, vast quantities of junk food and beverages are consumed...
...Joe Mantello has directed with panache...
...Toads are awkward in ponds or lakes and tend to spend most of the day hiding under rocks...
...Toad thrums, "I love a lively dialogue/With my good friend Frog...
...Greenberg, who admits that he came late to the subject of major league baseball, takes up where the Prof left off...
...If there was nothing in the fridge, why not have called the local restaurant for takeout...
...To most of the sportswriters this conjures up a mincing, effeminate figure, even though they have seen with their own eyes that Darren can swagger like Barry Bonds, hit like Ted Williams, field like Willie Mays, and run like a deer...
...He knows next to nothing about letters, zilch about baseball, and is burdened with phobias about almost everything...
...Sonia: In your circle, do you pass for attractive...
...the disdainful Hubert might give Henry a hand up after all...
...And whispers of players' sexual proclivities have been part of the baseball rumor mill since at least the 1930s...
...Frog notes that Toad, "is not so good at sports/And then, of course, he's got those warts," but is an amusing companion anyway...
...His protagonist is Darren Lemming (Daniel Sunjata), a superstar of the fictive New York Empires, whose mixed race and phenomenal athletic abilities suggest those of the Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter...
...they aren't the whole story...
...That gastropod, like his woodland colleagues, never sings down to the children...
...Nonetheless, the group meshes well under the smart direction of Matthew Warchus, who, along with the flashy set designs of Mark Thompson, almost makes us forget the play's one logical flaw...
...With all its undercurrents, I know of no other dramatic work that has caught the meaning of those lines so well...
...In fact, it takes the snail the rest of the entire 90-minute show to reach his destination...
...Worshipfully, Mars takes care of Darren's finances, and tiptoes around the subject of homosexuality...
...That a famous man with everything to lose would go public about his private life leaves Mars stunned...
...Where would the universe be without us...
...In the first, the gloves are off and the infighting is vicious, personal and often hilarious...
...The play's central conflict arises from a melodramatic flareup between Darren and Davey, who suddenly turns into a black Rick Santorum, booming about the wickedness of homosexuality and terminating their friendship...
...Toad is convinced that he looks awful in a bathing suit, and refuses to be seen in public...
...Frog, naturally, knows that greenery cannot be hurried...
...And, from his entrance to the final curtain, ?'Hare pockets the show...
...The narrative drive comes from the collisions of two very different personalities...
...Her hard-edged glamour alternates between hostility and vulnerability without missing a beat...
...In Life (X) 3, Reza is as good as her word—and her silences...
...A Year With Frog and Toad could easily have succumbed to a case of the cutes...
...Everyone is given exactly the same chance...
...Were it any other couple, Inez (Linda Emond) and Hubert (Brent Spiner) would be instructed to go away and come back in 24 hours...
...And Emond's woefully articulate dipsomaniac is one of the most memorable performances of this or any other season...
...Jacques Barzun's celebrated line, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball," needs more articulation in an age of declining attendance and absurdly inflated salaries...
...The love is homosexuality, and the game is baseball...
...A dreary, black place without an ounce of poetry...
...Hubert, for instance...
...Essentially, there is no plot...
...Frogs, for example, are at ease in water and like to display themselves in the sun...
...What a nice frog you have there,' saidmy father...
...Early on...
...Professor Barzun himself was closer to the truth when he took a second look: "The idea of baseball is a team, an outfit, a section, a gang, a union, a cell, a commando squad—in short, a 20th century setup of opposite numbers...
...He makes the mistake of giving it to a snail (Frank Vlastnik...
...I couldn't understand what it was that I didn't like about baseball, hadn't liked about it...
...Sonia: In my home...
...There can be no doubt about padding or makeup...
...It happened that Lobel's daughter Adrianne was the one who pointed him to those amphibians some 40 years ago...
...On balance, though, the production at the Walter Kerr Theater works as a paean to hardball, and as a plea for a kind of amused tolerance between gays and straights...
...and Kevin Adams' resourceful lighting design cannot be praised too highly...
...Since Inez and Hubert have arrived on the wrong night, no meal has been prepared...
...It's the guests they expected—tomorrow night...
...Sonia: Henry asked me if I found you attractive...
...Kippy is a college-educated husband and father who uses words like "congeries" and is wholly without bias...
...He lives alone, can barely admit to his own preference for males, and refuses to countenance any talk on the subject...
...Frog (Jay Goede), naturally, loves to tell ghost stories...
...Her listeners' mute response is eloquent beyond phrases and backchat...
...This harangue would seem overdrawn, save for the fact that just two years ago a relief pitcher named John Rocker, then playing for the Atlanta Braves, complained of the racial mix and physical stink of immigrants in Manhattan and the Bronx...
...All that is to change over the course of two acts...
...But Henry is a science professor whose life is in Hubert's hands—one good word and a career advances...
...Together and alone, they idled their days away in the style of such anthropomorphic works as Kenneth Grattarne's Wind in the Willows, and Beatrix Potter's adventures of Peter Rabbit & Co...
...This is a toad.' And I patiently explained all the differences in appearance and lifestyle between the two amphibians...
...Lobel's stage design is a fine homage to her father's drawings, Martin Pakledinaz' costumes are funny and light, and the Reales' infectious melodies, swung by musical director and pianist Linda Twine and a seven-man band, keep the audience's toes in motion...
...It imagined the friendship of two very different animals, one secure and stable, the other fearful and perplexed...
...They give them too many words...
...Not all of Take Me Out is that precisely on target...
...Mars' talk often amounts to standup comedy, but the lines are fresh, and O'Hare delivers them with the kind of timing and amiability that Jerry Seinfeld would envy...
...French playwright Yasmina Reza (Art) has observed: "Most writers don't know that actors are never better than in the pauses or in the subtext...
...Predictably, tongues become loosened and hidden personality quirks come to light...
...Frog observes that Toad never gets any mail, and writes him a letter...
...This is too harsh...
...However, the wine cellar is full...
...Hubert: Did you say very...
...It has no shortage of laughs, some poignant moments, and mercifully few collisions at the plate...
...Hubert: You'll find out on Monday...
...They're useful for the actors, but only that...
...Turturro, always an interesting performer, suggests the bipolarity of his character, but not the cerebration...
...only last year, Mets catcher Mike Piazza was forced to put down rumors by announcing to the world that he was not gay...
...But now matters have grown far worse: "Every night I have to take a shower with a faggot...
...Toad wants the flower seeds he just planted to grow immediately...
...The third is almost happy, though it contains an undertow of melancholy: Inez is a flat-out alcoholic, and her husband's incessant putdowns make certain that she will stay that way...
...As the skipper and the best friend, Lisi and Huff hold the drama together, aided by the stalwart ensemble work of men who truly look like ballplayers...
...One day I came in from the woods with a small animal in the palm of my hand...
...She is also as good as her title (the French know it as Trots Versions de la Vie—Three Versions of Life...
...Not long after her revelations, the first Frog and Toad book appeared...
...Amid all the clever prattle and insult comedy, though, Inez is the one who sounds the sole humane note of the evening...
...It's the remarkable symmetry of everything,'- notes the fan with the mind of an accountant...
...The host couple, Sonia (Helen Hunt) and Henry (John Turturro) are in the throes of an argument about whether to indulge or discipline their yowling offstage child...
...But Linn-Baker and Goede keep admirably straight faces, and David Petrarca directs with a disarming simplicity...
...This is not a frog,' I replied...
...If this isn't a Tony Award performance, that prize is without meaning...
...The late baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, once remarked that baseball "is designed to break your heart...
...Therefore, mortified as they are, Sonia and Henry decide to put a good face on the evening and welcome their visitors...
...Shortstop Kippy Sunderstrom (Neal Huff), who functions as the show's narrator, alternately jumps into the plot and out of it...
Vol. 86 • May 2003 • No. 3
