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Off-Broadway Play About Baseball Steroid Scandal
[November 19th, 2008] by Millard Baker
A new off-broadway play about the Major League Baseball steroid scandal opens at the New York City Center MTC Stage 2 on November 18, 2008. Daniel Aukin directs the Manhattan Theatre Club production of “Back Back Back.”
Does greatness always come with a price? Can only someone with nothing to lose tell the whole truth? From the acclaimed writer of last season’s MTC Stage II hit The Four of Us and Bach at Leipzig comes a stirring new drama about America’s favorite pastime. Back Back Back follows the turbulent careers of three very different teammates in baseball’s steroid era whose clubhouse secrets bring them under federal scrutiny.
Playwright Itamar Moses revisits the steroid scandal with a fictionalized exploration of the relationships between admitted steroid user Jose Canseco and implicated steroid user Mark McGwire juxtaposed against team’s “steroid abstainer” Walt Weiss.
Once again, Itamar Moses has changed the names to protect the guilty. In the writer’s fun, structurally clever baseball dramedy “Back Back Back,” the offending parties are Raul, Kent and Adam — proxies for admitted steroid promoter Jose Canseco, accused steroid user Mark McGwire and supposed steroid abstainer Walt Weiss, the Oakland Athletics’ three consecutive rookies of the year from 1986-88.
Critic reviews of the steroid play were mixed.
Joe Dziemianowicz of the New York Daily News was disappointed and felt the play needed a “little juicing of its own.”
Kent (Jeremy Davidson) is the easygoing natural using unnatural performance-enhancers to maintain his status as a respected star. The Latino Raul (James Martinez) has overcome his underprivileged roots and has the swagger to show for it. Both are using “pregame vitamins” to boost their power by the time Adam (Michael Mosley), a not-so-naive rookie, joins their team. Adam steers clear of steroids and has to determine if he’ll turn narc.
The men intersect at key points throughout their lives, culminating when Raul (even baseball dummies will get that he’s a stand-in for Jose Canseco) has written a tell-all book (his motives remain murky) that damns Kent (a thinly veiled Mark McGwire). Their meeting, as they wait to testify before a congressional committee, gets superheated and physical. The push-comes-to-shove gives the play a jolt it sorely needs. Though by the time this moment arrived, at the bottom of the ninth, I admit I’d been actually thinking about stealing home.
Sam Thielman of Variety gave a more positive review although he thought the “pseudo-intellectual” treatment of the subject did not convey much more than “Steroids bad. Baseball noble. Raul douche bag.”
Granted, the overlap between the theater and sports worlds is not a large one — for example, David Zinn’s set, which is supposed to be a series of weight rooms at multimillion-dollar ballclubs, looks like fifth-period gym. But as soon as Moses outlines his topic, even the dimmest theatergoer will come to the same conclusions: Steroids bad. Baseball noble. Raul douche bag.
Where “Back Back Back” goes right is in the exploration of the three guys as characters. What kind of person would tempt his friend to sin and then destroy him for succumbing? That’s a more interesting question than the widely debated “What have steroids done to baseball?” That may be good to ask at some point in the future, but for now, Moses should have contented himself with the people and let history sort itself out.
Steve Kettmann, the ghostwriter for Jose Canseco’s first book, gave the most positive review in spite of his over-familiarity with the source material.
The notion of an imagined conversation between Canseco and McGwire about why one of them wrote the book that would kill the Hall of Fame chances of the other is, to any real sports fans or to anyone who has grappled with the baseball issues of recent years, deeply fascinating and irresistible. For sheer creative bravado and raw courage, I think we owe young Berkeley, Calif.-born playwright Itamar Moses an extended ovation. And I defy anyone to question the man’s ability to imagine his way to truth that others have missed.
Photo credit: Joan Marcus, Playbill
Tags: baseball, jose canseco, mark mcgwire
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March 1, 2009 at 9:03 pm
[...] production of playwright Itamar Moses’ dramedy about the steroids in baseball scandal. The off-broadway play “Back Back Back” is a ...