Myth, Ambition and Anger

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Essayists on the American mind usually find it impossible to go much longer than two or three paragraphs before making some reference to Calvinism. But it takes guts for a playwright to make John Calvin, the 16th century theologian, an actual character onstage. Scholars of popular culture frequently assert that the national soul is mirrored in the game of baseball. Yet it takes great faith -- not only in his own intelligence but also in the audience's -- for a dramatist to depict the making of the American imperium through the life of centerfielder Ty Cobb. The nation's theater has long excelled at the agonies and ecstasies of family life but has faltered at portraying the broad sweep of public life; its ambitions have been toward emotional, not intellectual, riches. Thus two new plays appearing in metropolitan San Diego would be noteworthy for their reach, whatever their merits. But what Keith Reddin, 34, aspires to in Life During Wartime and Lee Blessing, 40, aims at in Cobb proves in each case to be well within the writer's grasp.

Reddin's play, at the La Jolla Playhouse, is much the more complicated of the two -- and certainly the wackier. Instead of a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama, this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama-cum-farce, featuring fantasy sequences, flashbacks, ghosts, tall tales, quoted swatches of e.e. cummings verse and repeated incursions into a contemporary setting by a bearded and costumed Calvin. He recites his writings on predestination and free will and inveighs, sounding suspiciously like a televangelist, against the iniquities of Pop culture. The "war" of the title is not an event but a metaphor. It refers to the sense of embattlement that prompts some suburban householders to buy security systems and others to turn their homes into armories.

What fuses this apparent chaos into a coherent and haunting play is the theme that runs through all of Reddin's work, notably Rum and Coke (1985), Big Time (1987) and Nebraska (1989): the tandem dangers of run-amuck individualism and nice-guy uninvolvement. The central character in Life During Wartime is, like almost all of Reddin's heroes, a genial but morally weightless young man. When he learns that other salespeople in his home-security firm are running a sideline in burglary -- for the loot and to generate additional sales -- he assumes it has nothing to do with him. Tragically late, he finds that it does. Reddin's point, no less forceful for being familiar, is that the unexamined life is not worth living.

The show leaves one wishing that Reddin were less preoccupied with writing about people so lacking in self-awareness, so ethically dead that in a crisis they shrivel rather than change. By temperament he cuts himself off from straightforward plot development. His characters rarely grow and deepen, eliminating another avenue by which plays accumulate impact. Thus this fine writer produces works that stimulate the mind but do not linger in the heart.

Blessing's daring as a playwright lies in his choice of such subjects as the vagaries of thwarted genius (Eleemosynary, 1985), nuclear-arms control (A Walk in the Woods, 1987) and serial killers (Down the Road, 1989). In his new work, at San Diego's Old Globe Theater, his interest in the story of Tyrus Raymond Cobb is partly biographical: the youth whose mother shot his father dead, the spikes-flying player who had millions of admirers but no friends, the hero whose funeral attracted just two fellow major leaguers. But Blessing's deeper concern is the America that shaped Cobb and that he in turn came to epitomize, an agrarian nation awakening into aspirations on the world stage. Simply put, Blessing's thesis is that Cobb changed baseball in exactly the ways that the 20th century changed America, by bringing the techniques of science and the mentality of all-out warfare to what had been a pastoral pastime.

Because Blessing's focus is on Cobb's psyche rather than on the literal depiction of events, three of the four characters are the man himself, seen in youth, prosperous middle age and terminal illness. They bicker but share a preoccupation with transmuting Cobb's life into legend. The set is a tier of bleachers filled with black-and-white images of early 20th century fans. For all the Cobbs, the most agonizing moment comes when an upper section lights to reveal a portrait of Babe Ruth, the beloved idol Cobb could never manage to % become. The fourth character is a forgotten Hall of Famer from the segregated Negro leagues, Oscar Charleston, likened in his time to Ruth and Cobb. The play, staged by Yale Drama School's dean, Lloyd Richards, has tightened since an earlier version was produced there. The one shortcoming in San Diego is that Dan Martin, who succeeds Delroy Lindo as the black Cobb, does not capture the dark and driven spirit of that, or perhaps any, great competitor. Therefore his appealing performance fails to reinforce the most sobering of all Blessing's assertions, that the very qualities that make a hero make for a morally deficient man. Cobb takes, one might say, a Calvinist view of baseball, and America, and mankind.