Chamber Theatre bats 1.000 with 'Sweetest Swing'

Form JSOnline

By Mike Fischer, Special to the Journal Sentinel

Posted: April 17, 2010

Professional baseball players remember those rare 5-for-5 games all their lives. The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's dramatic final at-bat in its five-play season caps a 5-for-5 year with a walk-off home run.

The Chamber's latest hit is playwright Rebecca Gilman's "The Sweetest Swing in Baseball." A stellar Chamber squad managed by C. Michael Wright played its first game under the lights on Friday night, before a large house of appreciative fans.

"Baseball" revolves around Dana Fielding, a talented painter whose career has hit the skids as she struggles with high expectations and harsh critics. The joy has leached out of her art and her life, and it's no surprise when she lands in a mental ward after trying to kill herself.

When Dana's cheapskate insurance company moves to have her discharged, she delays her release, exaggerating her condition by impersonating troubled baseball star Darryl Strawberry.

Given how little Dana knows about baseball, the results are extremely funny, in a play generating considerable humor from the friction between who its characters pretend to be and who they really are.

But despite its laughs, "Baseball" is ultimately a heartbreaking play. For Dana and Darryl also have a lot in common, with each other and with Gilman, as sensitive artists whose life's work is often misunderstood or trashed by an unappreciative public that gives too little and expects too much.

Mary MacDonald Kerr hits it out of the park as Dana, morphing from the knock-kneed artist who hugs herself too tightly so she won't drift away into an increasingly expansive - but still wary - performance as "the Straw." Moving seamlessly between these two selves, Kerr lets us see all that Dana risks losing as she tries to find herself.

Each of Kerr's versatile teammates - Laura Gray, Nicholas Harazin, Peter Reeves and Linda Stephens - plays two characters, adding up to a formidable baseball nine without a weak spot in the batting order.

Nathan Stuber's sparse, all-white set embodies the agony and the ecstasy of a prop-free world in which the self has been stripped bare and the slate has been wiped clean, while Holly Blomquist's richly textured lighting illustrates Dana's broad range of options as she steps up to the plate and gamely begins again.