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[其他] 带我去玩/take me out[avi][90mb][rayfile][英语无字]
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Three years ago, I spoke with Richard Greenberg, the author of Take Me Out, soon after it had premiered on Broadway. The show had previously been a runaway hit in London of all places, where baseball is as familiar to them as cricket is to Americans. I asked him how a country that has no clue about the DH could appreciate his script of an extremely New York Yankees-like team and the struggles they endure when their Derek Jeter-like mega-superstar player admits to being a homosexual. He pointed out the universality of the themes of machismo versus homosexuality, inclusion versus exclusion, and how even Godlike heroes can be toppled by basic humanity. I agreed with him. In London, baseball was a vehicle like any other setting in which to place titans and their flaws. In New York, baseball became an additional element that helped to give context to a poignant story. In Phoenix, Damon Dering and his wildly successful alternative company Nearly Naked Theatre have mounted the production with mixed results. Dering’s production would play better in London, because anyone with an ounce of baseball knowledge might spend too much time noting the many flaws in casting, costuming, and basic baseball principles that make this play, in the words of Dering, for “theatre. If [audiences] want baseball, go to the ballpark.” What he has instead created is a production that tips toward the emotional element and almost willfully ignores its setting. It’s a choice, but even that isn’t successfully achieved.
I’m a baseball fan, and given Dering’s choice between going to the theatre and going to the ballpark, I’d be completely torn. I’m actually glad that most of baseball season falls outside of the theatre season so that I don’t have to make the choice too often: inside this critic lies a wannabe Mets pitcher. If you know nothing about baseball, then you won’t notice as I and my wife did the awkwardness of actors trying to pitch and hit, a team on the bench when they should be out in the field, the tallest shortstop in history (the folksy Joseph Kremer as storyteller Kippy Sunderstrom), or an impossibly low number given to a recent call-up from Double-A (Dion Johnson in a stellar portrayal of the racist Shane Mungitt). Call me a nit-picker, but Dering purposely not taking his setting into account is sloppy direction just as much as if he’d changed a play setting from pre-Revolutionary France to the 1920s and utilized American events to justify the move. Oh, wait…
This would all be so much Dramaturgical dick pulling on my part if there weren’t flaws theatrically balancing the standard impressive elements for which Dering has come to be known. Let me first note the kudos. Johnson and both Rons (May and Hunting) give the kind of performances that force you to raise your future expectations. Why Johnson is still giving away performances for free is a mystery: Will someone get David Ira in to see this performance? May is so damned cute as the nebbish outcast accountant Mason that he has become the unintended center of the production. Hunting plays the even-keeled Skipper and the uncomfortable fan Danziger with the kind of honesty that has become a trademark of his impressive talent and the tension in each of the character’s big scenes is electrifying. In their smaller roles, Rhys Gilyeat and John Haubner are generally on-target. David A. Lucas’s offering as the strutting Davey Battle is perhaps better than the actor who performed it on Broadway and newcomer Brandon Lee, despite his awkward attempts at pitching, is a strong Takeshi.
But this show is not about Mungitt, Skipper, or even the full character arc of Mason. At the center of the play is Darren Lemming (Jamie Cotton), the demigod who learns to become human. Cotton is not a particularly strong actor, despite looking every bit of the role, so when he spouts the lines that point out Lemming’s total lack of a clue about how the world works for people, he comes off much too self-centered, a choice by Cotton and Dering that forces the sympathy of the play toward Mason because it’s easier to like a nebbish than to empathize with a headstrong hero. The role calls not for self-centeredness, but for the kind of hubristic matter-of-factness one gets from a character like Oedipus or Willy Loman. It’s easier to connect to true self-delusion becoming tragedy than to learn to like a character with an ugly vainglorious streak. Cotton loosened up and began to recite less as the opening night progressed, but the initial choices made it hard to be won back. As charming as Kremer is, his acting regimen is beginning to flatten: His characters are starting to sound a little too similar to each other, and they’re even morphing into the genial Kremer himself. It’s time to shake up the Jimmy Stewart routine a bit.
David Weiss’ scenic design is every bit as professional as an upper mid-range company, with some nifty choices as the single stage that ingeniously becomes locker room, cityscape, ballpark playing field, and a working shower with minimal changes. Bob Nelson’s lighting design is very strong, and his sound design works save for one errant short in a speaker leading to an annoying evening-long hiss. The costumes supplied by the Artist’s Repertory Theatre in Portland and Jerica Nelson are impeccable, and Dering’s alterations made them seem to be customized. Dering’s mullet creation for Mungitt is wonderful. A lot of work has obviously gone into the design and implementation of the production, and everyone involved deserves a standing ovation.
Dering has created a production aimed specifically to artistic types, yet in purposely choosing to concentrate on theatricality over a reasonable observation of all elements of this multi-faceted script, he has done it a disservice. Non-baseball fans would almost certainly be willing to forgive this, except that the weaknesses in characters at the center of the production serve to undercut some really amazing performances within his otherwise strong theatrical element. I recognize that the lead role’s casting in Phoenix may be one of the toughest, so perhaps the best choice in mounting this amazing play might have been to wait until the ideal casting could be ensured. Because of its ever-growing list of amazing achievements, NNT is long past the point of allowing concessions. Where Dering may have been valiantly fighting a battle to prove to the publisher that his company was the right choice to produce the show in the Valley, perhaps he should also have been keeping an eye on the talent pool to see if the Valley was truly the right choice for a production. |
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