TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072390/0723411.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.4 KB | 113 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 78

Myth, Ambition and Anger


In California, new plays tackle what it means to be American

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    Essayists on the American mind usually find it impossible
to go much longer than two or three paragraphs before making
some reference to Calvinism. But it takes guts for a playwright
to make John Calvin, the 16th century theologian, an actual
character onstage. Scholars of popular culture frequently
assert that the national soul is mirrored in the game of
baseball. Yet it takes great faith -- not only in his own
intelligence but also in the audience's -- for a dramatist to
depict the making of the American imperium through the life of
centerfielder Ty Cobb. The nation's theater has long excelled
at the agonies and ecstasies of family life but has faltered
at portraying the broad sweep of public life; its ambitions
have been toward emotional, not intellectual, riches. Thus two
new plays appearing in metropolitan San Diego would be
noteworthy for their reach, whatever their merits. But what
Keith Reddin, 34, aspires to in Life During Wartime and Lee
Blessing, 40, aims at in Cobb proves in each case to be well
within the writer's grasp.

    Reddin's play, at the La Jolla Playhouse, is much the more
complicated of the two -- and certainly the wackier. Instead
of a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama, this is an
everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama-cum-farce, featuring
fantasy sequences, flashbacks, ghosts, tall tales, quoted
swatches of e.e. cummings verse and repeated incursions into a
contemporary setting by a bearded and costumed Calvin. He
recites his writings on predestination and free will and
inveighs, sounding suspiciously like a televangelist, against
the iniquities of Pop culture. The "war" of the title is not
an event but a metaphor. It refers to the sense of embattlement
that prompts some suburban householders to buy security systems
and others to turn their homes into armories.

    What fuses this apparent chaos into a coherent and haunting
play is the theme that runs through all of Reddin's work,
notably Rum and Coke (1985), Big Time (1987) and Nebraska
(1989): the tandem  dangers of run-amuck individualism and
nice-guy uninvolvement. The central character in Life During
Wartime is, like almost all of Reddin's heroes, a genial but
morally weightless young man. When he learns that other
salespeople in his home-security firm are running a sideline in
burglary -- for the loot and to generate additional sales -- he
assumes it has nothing to do with him. Tragically late, he
finds that it does. Reddin's point, no less forceful for being
familiar, is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

    The show leaves one wishing that Reddin were less
preoccupied with writing about people so lacking in
self-awareness, so ethically dead that in a crisis they shrivel
rather than change. By temperament he cuts himself off from
straightforward plot development. His characters rarely grow
and deepen, eliminating another avenue by which plays
accumulate impact. Thus this fine writer produces works that
stimulate the mind but do not linger in the heart.

    Blessing's daring as a playwright lies in his choice of such
subjects as the vagaries of thwarted genius (Eleemosynary,
1985), nuclear-arms control (A Walk in the Woods, 1987) and
serial killers (Down the Road, 1989). In his new work, at San
Diego's Old Globe Theater, his interest in the story of Tyrus
Raymond Cobb is partly biographical: the youth whose mother
shot his father dead, the spikes-flying player who had millions
of admirers but no friends, the hero whose funeral attracted
just two fellow major leaguers. But Blessing's deeper concern
is the America that shaped Cobb and that he in turn came to
epitomize, an agrarian nation awakening into aspirations on the
world stage. Simply put, Blessing's thesis is that Cobb changed
baseball in exactly the ways that the 20th century changed
America, by bringing the techniques of science and the
mentality of all-out warfare to what had been a pastoral
pastime.

    Because Blessing's focus is on Cobb's psyche rather than on
the literal depiction of events, three of the four characters
are the man himself, seen in youth, prosperous middle age and
terminal illness. They bicker but share a preoccupation with
transmuting Cobb's life into legend. The set is a tier of
bleachers filled with black-and-white images of early 20th
century fans. For all the Cobbs, the most agonizing moment
comes when an upper section lights to reveal a portrait of Babe
Ruth, the beloved idol Cobb could never manage to become. The
fourth character is a forgotten Hall of Famer from the
segregated Negro leagues, Oscar Charleston, likened in his time
to Ruth and Cobb. The play, staged by Yale Drama School's dean,
Lloyd Richards, has tightened since an earlier version was
produced there. The one shortcoming in San Diego is that Dan
Martin, who succeeds Delroy Lindo as the black Cobb, does not
capture the dark and driven spirit of that, or perhaps any,
great competitor. Therefore his appealing performance fails to
reinforce the most sobering of all Blessing's assertions, that
the very qualities that make a hero make for a morally
deficient man. Cobb takes, one might say, a Calvinist view of
baseball, and America, and mankind.