Theater review:
'Rounding' hits it out of the ballpark


By Mary Lee Grisanti
Special Correspondent

Published November 4 2007

"Rounding Third," the fast, funny, two-man show that opened Stamford Theatre Works' 20th anniversary season, is something completely different. It might be called "guy" theater. Not David Mamet, cigar-chewing, stab-you-in-the-back "guy" theater, or Neil Labute, misogynistic, stab-you-in-the-guts "guy" theater. It is a theater of baseball, beer and Barcaloungers; buddies, babes and male bonding. It is the kind of comedy where a kid breaks his father's heart by deserting the pitcher's mound for the cast of "Brigadoon."

But despite the plethora of boy iconography, there is something reassuringly dramatic stirring under the bravado of playwright Richard Dresser's new odd couple: two mismatched Little League coaches. Coach Don - a working-class, Italian ex-ballplayer - and his new, metrosexual (read Canadian) assistant, Coach Michael, have the most cringe-worthy kinship since Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. Yet, like their comic forebears, they have an uncanny ability to know each other's pain and what might be an inimitably masculine way of soothing it.

In the interests of full disclosure: Your faithful reviewer is a female, a Yankees fan who is more interested in the idea of A-Rod than in activities that require athletic supporters. Director and Stamford Theatre Works founder Steve Karp played baseball, from two championship Babe Ruth teams, to varsity baseball at Tufts, to turning down offers from the New York Mets and Boston Red Sox to go to Boston University Law School. We can be happy that he figuratively defected from shortstop to "Brigadoon." It seems strange to say that a humorous, 90-minute stage treatment of America's favorite pastime, starring two middle-aged white guys, could be risky theater. But precisely because it's so homey and so unapologetically un-arty, it is.

Karp gets affecting, heartfelt performances out of Christopher Cass as Coach Michael and Marco Verna as Coach Don. It is easier to like Verna's Don - he's a force of locker room nature with a broad Queensborough accent to back it up. It's hard not to be charmed by his dedication to winning; it's as unpretentious and real as he is. Verna is also handsome and cocky in just the way you would want him to be; fun to look at as well as to laugh at. But he has enough tenderness that when the right time comes, your laughter dies in your throat.

Cass's Michael is more complicated, someone whose surface is yuppily irritating, but whose depths are loyal and loving. He does a good job of getting on Don's - and our - nerves. But his dogged goodness wins us over well before it succeeds with Don, and by the climax of the play, when the action freezes briefly to let us hear what is really in Michael's heart, we are genuinely moved. He embodies every parent's prayer for his child: "Please God, just this one time, let my kid get what he's worked so hard for."

Ken Larson's sets and Aaron Meadow's lighting are unfussy and effective. Christopher A. Granger's sound design makes giggling and applause materialize quite credibly from the "stands" where the audience is sitting, helping sustain the illusion that we are right there behind the chain-link fence. Costumes look exactly like what the actors came to the ball park, er, theater, wearing.

*