Sweetest swing
May. 2nd, 2006 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidThis weekend I also went to the BTW production of The Sweetest Swing in Baseball (Rebecca Gilman), which was excellent. (Warning: spoiler potential.)
The story is about an artist who has a bad show and a break-up which leads to a suicide attempt. She ends up in a mental institution, and is afraid to go back to her life, afraid she'll slip again, or fail again.... so she pretends to be a baseball player (Darryl Strawberry), to get a diagnosis that will keep her in. Except that it becomes freeing, not being herself, and she falls into it completely.
It worked, beautifully, an intense story that has a lot of funny stuff in it as well. The lines rang so true, so right, that it felt less like a play than glimpses of an actual life. Even the set changes worked as interesting transitions, as two walls folded this way or that, or furniture was trundled in by stage workers in scrubs, and sometimes the actors shifted onstage as well, with low lighting (rather than blackouts) letting it all be seen, and the music tying it all together.
I recognized three of the actors: Sarah Newhouse (the lead character) most recently in some ASP productions, Chris Brophy (the boyfriend/ the psychopath) in Take Me Out (Is two maladjusted characters a trend?), and Maureen Keiller (gallery owner/ psychiatrist) in Veronika Vavoom, Vulcanologist. And definite kudos to the director, Jason Southerland.
And the bizarre loud fan noises from the ceiling are distracting me from writing anything more.
The story is about an artist who has a bad show and a break-up which leads to a suicide attempt. She ends up in a mental institution, and is afraid to go back to her life, afraid she'll slip again, or fail again.... so she pretends to be a baseball player (Darryl Strawberry), to get a diagnosis that will keep her in. Except that it becomes freeing, not being herself, and she falls into it completely.
It worked, beautifully, an intense story that has a lot of funny stuff in it as well. The lines rang so true, so right, that it felt less like a play than glimpses of an actual life. Even the set changes worked as interesting transitions, as two walls folded this way or that, or furniture was trundled in by stage workers in scrubs, and sometimes the actors shifted onstage as well, with low lighting (rather than blackouts) letting it all be seen, and the music tying it all together.
I recognized three of the actors: Sarah Newhouse (the lead character) most recently in some ASP productions, Chris Brophy (the boyfriend/ the psychopath) in Take Me Out (Is two maladjusted characters a trend?), and Maureen Keiller (gallery owner/ psychiatrist) in Veronika Vavoom, Vulcanologist. And definite kudos to the director, Jason Southerland.
And the bizarre loud fan noises from the ceiling are distracting me from writing anything more.