THE 25TH MAN: SPENCE TAYLOR IS BACK!
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
With all the new faceless ballparks, high-dollar salaries, and cable superstation broadcasts, the charm of baseball has worn off a bit. Still, some part of all of us who grew up hurling Wiffle balls and doing play-by-play while throwing a rubber ball against the rebbetsen’s brick wall wishes we had made the big leagues and become true old-fashioned American heroes.
There’s something of the nostalgic, dreamy quality that baseball possesses in Dan Foley and Jeff Santo’s cute and simplistic The 25th Man: Spence Taylor Is Back!, which tells the story of a bench warmer for the Cubs who had one great season and is positioning himself to make a comeback. And yet the play, now at the Halsted Theatre Centre, is so obvious and mawkish it leaves one hungering for the days of one’s childhood, when dreams were real and not just authors’ cliches.
Taylor is a charming character and an almost heroic one, but how long can you listen to the philosophical musings of a guy whose idea of intelligent advice is “Hey battuh, hey battuh, hey battuh”? When the climactic moment comes and Taylor is asked to pinch-hit in a key game situation, there’s a little bit of suspense. But it comes not so much from wondering whether Taylor will come through and save the day, but from trying to figure out which trite ploy the authors will use to end this sucker.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Casey.
