A bright young artist who had previously earned high praise for her work is twitching through her latest exhibition. She is hiding out in a back room of the gallery, where she is having a crisis of confidence, a panic attack, and a nervous breakdown. Simultaneously.
In the next scene we find her holed up in a psychiatric hospital, where she has been taken after having attempted suicide by slicing her wrists with a knife — lengthwise along the veins rather than across them.
It seems that our heroine, Dana (scrupulously played by CB Spencer), fears that her newest art work doesn’t live up to her earlier promise. “Maybe it was all just hype,” she moans.
Thus begins the Los Angeles premiere of Rebecca Gilman’s haunting comedy “The Sweetest Swing in Baseball.” An exploration of success, identity, and the nature of insanity, Gilman’s play, like all her work, is intelligent, provocative, and insanely funny.
Dana’s behavior at the hospital is influenced by two new friends: Roy (Jerry Lloyd), an angry sociopath who was convicted of attempting to murder a CNN anchor-man whose opinions and attitudes he disagreed with, and Michael (Brian Weir), a gay young addict undergoing rehab for the umpteenth time.
It is they who inform her that her health insurance will cover only 10 days of hospital treatment — unless she can come up with some major syndrome that requires a longer stay. After reading a biography of baseball star Darryl Strawberry, Dana decides to assume his identity and the symptoms of Multiple Personality Disorder. Though she knows very little about baseball and keeps making goofy gaffes, the doctors allow her to stay.
As her condition improves (“being Darryl freed me up,” she exults), she begins to paint again. Only now she is painting baseball scenes populated by chickens in baseball caps.
“There’s no point in trying,” Gary, the grumpy sociopath, tells her. “Everybody’s a wannabe-something,” he says. “The difference between wannabes and losers is that wannabes make things and losers break things.”
Strangely enough, Dana’s baseball chickens are a huge success and her reputation is revitalized. But not her identity. In the end is she a lost artist or a wannabe baseball player?
Rebecca Gilman, on the other hand, is not a wannabe nor a loser. Her reputation as an award-winning playwright is well-established and her talent has never been in question. With “The Sweetest Swing in Baseball” she has delivered another crowd-pleasing hit. The production starts off slowly, leaving you wondering where it’s going, but it picks up the pace in the second act and, while Gilman doesn’t completely knock one out of the ball park, “The Sweetest Swing in Baseball” has to go into the record books as a solid RBI.
The company, which also includes Lilo Greenwald and Ferrell Marshall in multiple parts, is earnest and believable and well-directed by the excellent Ross Kramer for the West Coast Ensemble, with which he has been associated for the last 15 years. The set design by Stephen Gifford is adequate and serviceable, but Kramer has added a unique touch to the scene changes.
The two-man crew who move tables and chairs around to create galleries, hospital rooms, and offices (in this case Brad Cook and Brad Ekstrand) are dressed in appropriate costumes for the scene and incorporate little pieces of business that make them part of the over-all action. That ploy, plus the sound design of Ron Klier, make the many scene changes both speedy and palatable.
“The Sweetest Swing in Baseball” will be presented Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. through June 8 at the El Centro Theater, 804 N. El Centro Ave., in Hollywood.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 16, 2008. Read the original PDF.