Our two baseball teams have not been playing very artistically lately–not even when they win, which they’ve been doing about equally often. Nevertheless it has been a fine season for baseball art in the city. “Diamonds are Forever,” the baseball art exhibit put together by the New York State Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, came to the library Cultural Center in July for a two-month run. Before that, the play Bleacher Bums became a Chicago classic with its revival in late May at the Organic Theater under the direction of its original coauthor, Joe Mantegna. Neither artistic display was overwhelming–from the standpoint of a baseball fan or from the standpoint of a discerning critic–but both had their strong points; both were in the end pleasant diversions, like the way things used to be at Wrigley Field before the yuppies took over and the team got good again, and the way things are, much of the time, at Comiskey Park these days. If the observer doesn’t like baseball, there is not much to be seen at any of the locations just named, but if he or she is a baseball fan there is not much of anything wasted in the invested time.
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As a play, Bleacher Bums is a fairly sparse affair. Like so much of the theater in the city these days, it is a drama of scenes and performances, tied together rather meagerly by a moralistic theme. Its main strength is that it doesn’t let the demands of plot and drama get in the way of a good time. It’s a day spent in the bleachers watching a second-division ball team in late August, before the kids come up and give everyone a renewed sense of hope, that first glimpse of next year. That metaphor, by the way, is meant as a compliment, as any fan of the game should know. The hope that is manufactured in Bleacher Bums is churned out with all the knowing sense of real value that a bad Mexican restaurant puts into its tacos, and therein lies its saving grace.
The betting angle that lends the play its alleged drama on the way to its final moral would be laughable if it weren’t treated with such hearty zeal right in the face of the Pete Rose scandal. What the play winds up conveying is not that betting is bad or dangerous–although its dangers are hinted at–but that it’s wrong to let the pursuit of money overwhelm the callings of one’s heartstrings. Such a sentiment is laughable, but Lou Milione almost gets away with it nevertheless in his final dream narration as the blind fan. Also strong are performances by Ron Dean as the fan with the sandpaper voice and–at this stage of the run–Brian Doyle-Murray as the savvy bookie Marvin and Robert Breuler as the small-time book who bets his heart. Breuler, in fact, is probably my favorite actor in the city right now. He was fine at Steppenwolf as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and as the Jim Thompson character in Killers, and he was better than that as the Soviet diplomat in A Walk in the Woods. He’s not quite as good here, but only because there’s not much of a role to do anything with. As the steady business-executive’s bleacher fan, disrobing piece by piece inning by inning, wearing a variety of rally caps including one that gets him called “King Tut,” the only thing he lacks are the subtle gradations of tan on his arms and face. What more would anyone expect from a baseball fan who–unless I misremember one of my past issues of Stqgebill–once played Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith in a one-man show?
