MISTER RICKEY CALLS A MEETING
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I don’t think they were disappointed. Schmidt’s play–a hypothetical gathering of Paul Robeson, Joe Louis, and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson with Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947 to decide the future of a young baseball player named Jackie Robinson–displays exhaustive research and an astonishing technical virtuosity for a playwright so young. (Schmidt is 28 years old–even the actors in the CTC production, who saw the playwright for the first time on opening night, seemed to expect a sexagenarian at the very least. At the reception after the play Schmidt answered more questions about his age, graciously at first but with growing signs of irritation, than about his training or literary methods.)
Schmidt succeeds in this difficult genre not only because he has so extensively researched his subject but because he recognizes the conventions of the historical novel–and, by extension, the historical play. The first is that the narrator be some humble citizen who just happens to witness firsthand the great events of history–someone who tells the story from a naive and unprejudiced point of view much like our own. In this role Schmidt gives us Clancy Hope. We first see him as an old man with an autograph book, but when he announces his intention of telling us how he came to acquire some of the names therein, the time shifts to 1947, when he was a young busboy in Manhattan’s Hotel Roosevelt waiting on the people assembled for Rickey’s momentous meeting.
