posted by I-berg

No Mas friend Ben Younger, director of Boiler Room and Prime, recently took me to see Itamar Moses’ new ‘Back, Back, Back”, a play inspired by the lives of Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss. Prior to that night, theater had intersected with baseball exactly twice for me: seeing one of the 37 performances of ‘The First: A Jackie Robinson Musical” (How I love ya, How I love ya, Branch-ie!) in 1981 and refusing to see Damn Yankees my entire life, likely due to fear I’d enjoy it. ‘Back, Back, Back” was entirely superior to both of these. That’s faint praise, so let’s say that the play is up until December 28 at the New York City Center ($52) and I strongly recommend that you see it.

In our interview to follow, Moses downplays the importance of knowing baseball for ‘getting” the play. And while I don’t doubt that someone who isn’t hip to inside jokes about Tony La Russa will still enjoy it, for the baseball fluent, there are some especially rarified pleasures. But although occasionally very funny, Back Back Back is less a comedy than a morality play set in 80s and 90s baseball clubhouses. The dialogue is well timed and observed, the staging imaginatively transports a bare bones set from the ‘84 Olympics to the 2005 Congressional hearing, and the performances are excellent, including a standout job by Jeremy Davidson as ‘Kent”/McGwire. Again, I strongly recommend it, and with the possible exception of “The Great White Hope” which is before my time, I’m going to go ahead and give this the coveted No Mas all-time Tony.

Below is my interview with the playwright, who has famously feuded with his college friend and rival Jonathan Safran Foer (’Everything is Illuminated”), has a name worthy of a roster spot on the House of David traveling team, and is rapidly emerging as a major new talent.

No Mas: For even a casual sports fan, it’s immediately obvious who ‘Kent” and ‘Raul” are based on. Other characters,notably Tony LaRussa and Orel Hershiser, are directly named. Why not Canseco, McGwire, or Weiss?

Itamar Moses: It’s true that the off-stage players and managers referred to in the play are “real” people, but it felt important to make my on-stage players fictional. I think the layer of distance that adds helps in all kind of ways. It makes it easier to read the play as an allegory, which is what it is, and helps to suggest that the issues in the play are not limited to baseball, which they’re not. The play isn’t non-fiction, it isn’t a biopic or a docudrama, and trying to read it that way is an enormous mistake. (Which is why the critics who don’t like the play turn out, invariably, to have viewed it through that limited and limiting lens.) Kent, Raul, and Adam are, I hope, convincing portraits of professional athletes, but they’re also archetypes. I was interested in the dramatic situation, and the ideas and feelings it would allow me to explore, not in “outing” this or that real person.

NM: During Kent’s first lines, a press conference after the 1984 Olympics, the attention to how players really talk was so detailed that I knew the play was going to be very good. Did you take real pieces of dialogue wholesale from past interviews or how did your research into actual dialogue influence the way you wrote the play?

Moses: All the dialogue in the play is mine, with the possible exception of a wink to the 2005 congressional hearings in scene nine. So all of those direct address monologues to the press (scenes one, three, four, six, and eight) are invented. But I didn’t research that speaking style consciously, or anything. I think I’ve just watched and/or heard a LOT of interviews with athletes, and that voice, that sort of circuitous, empty, ramble, is just there in my head.

NM: Are you a fan? Or did you just find this particular relationship and this subject fertile ground?

I am a fan. More casual than I used to be, because my teams are all out in the Bay Area, which is where I’m from (Berkeley), and I now live in New York, where all the coverage of west coast teams is a day late, and it’s frustrating. But baseball was the sport I followed most passionately as a kid, especially when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve, which was in the late 80s, when the Giants and the A’s made all those runs to the playoffs and the series. For the record, I’m a Giants fan, which was a little odd in the east bay. Most other kids in Berkeley were A’s fans. It’s hard to explain why I’m not. I think initially I just thought orange and black looked cooler than green and yellow. I still think that, actually.

NM: The play very cleverly traces the points at which Canseco and McGwire intersected over the course of their careers. Did you take any liberties with the actual calendar?

Moses: Probably.

NM: At what point did you realize you could make something out of the history of
these intersections?

Moses: Actually, it was just the enormous irony of the way the scandal broke that suggested a play to me. The tarnished anti-hero bringing down the golden boy. And how personal it felt. Because it was two guys who’d known each other for decades. So that immediately suggested a play. But I didn’t begin writing it until it occurred to me to include a third player, the third point in the triangle, the guy who doesn’t use steroids and, in some odd way, ends up punished for doing what is ostensibly the “right” thing. Then the overall structure came into view.

NM: After I saw the play I met the actor who played Kent and he was very happy with the audience that night because they responded in all the right places and he could tell there were baseball people in the crowd. What are the challenges in writing and staging a play that presumes specialist knowledge? Do you think your play is as good for people who know nothing about baseball?

Moses: I don’t think the play requires specialized knowledge. I think baseball fans get a few extra insidery chuckles, like the Kirk Gibson reference, or they know who “Ivan and Raffy” are, but that’s it. A huge number of the positive comments I get about the play begin, “I know nothing about baseball, but…” Frankly, I think the play might be even better for non-baseball-specialists, since they seem to see more quickly and more clearly some of the things I was really writing about, masculinity, heroism, “what kind of man do I want to be, and why?” more than “here’s a great joke if you know Will Clark played on the ‘84 Olympic Team.” Those are like easter eggs. They’re gravy. But they’re not the point. My sense is that that baseball fans assume non-fans will have trouble following the play, when in fact they don’t, if you see what I mean. Because it’s actually like assuming non-real-estate agents will have trouble following GLENGARRY GLENN ROSS.

NM: Of the three main characters whose dialogue was hardest to write?

Moses: All three voices were pretty clear in my head on this one. I don’t know what that says about me as a person. Probably nothing good. But they’re in there..

NM: Did you do any direct interviews with ex-athletes? What other research did you do?

Moses: No interviews, but I read all the steroid and baseball related books I could get my hands on, just to do my due diligence. The research was actually most useful, though, for the labor dispute stuff, collusion, the strike, which is what I had the shallowest understanding of when I began the play.

NM: Most locker room scenes can’t get past the homoerotic grabassing. Your locker room world felt closer to a cop drama because it explored how codes of conduct are made and broke. Why isn’t their more good writing about sports of this kind and specifically more plays?

Moses: Apparently, writers as good as I am are extremely rare. Seriously, though, I think there are cliches for any setting or genre or style or what have you, and the reason we keep seeing them is some combination of fear and laziness. But I was just trying not to bore myself. I didn’t consciously reject those cliches, I just had no interest in them, and wrote what did interest me.

The other part of your question is harder to answer. I mean, maybe people who make theatre and people who like sports are two venn diagram circles that don’t overlap very much, though I suspect that’s more perception than reality. But it seems like there should be more. Because the relationship of an audience to a play and to a sporting event are actually very similar. On the other hand, it’s very hard to show any of an actual sport in a play, so maybe people don’t try for that reason. Which is why I displaced the game onto the off-field competition: the scenes ARE the game. (Which is also something some critics seem to be mystified by, but everybody else seems to get.) Movies have the “inspirational” sports story genre, which I don’t think would work enormously well in the theatre, and so I also think that on stage it’s more case by case: a playwright draws on something from the sports world as a potent metaphor, which is different from all the other sports plays, which are all different from each other.

NM: Gehrig and Ruth, Maris and Mantle, Canseco and McGwire, Moses and Safran Foer? Did you draw on that relationship and experience to understand what it might feel like to be Canseco or McGwire?

Moses: Hahaha. Ha. Um. Not really. I did draw on other relationships, though. You have to. It’s the only way to write something that rings true.

NM: Clemens, McNamee, Pettite, Grimsley. What do you think of the dramatic possibilities of that situation. Is there a play there for someone else?

Moses: I thought about that, when that all broke. It would make a play, sure. I can’t write it, probably, though. But here’s a good example of what I was talking about: that would be a baseball play, but a completely different one. The play it suggests to me is about the glow of being near celebrity, when you don’t have any of the skills yourself. A McNamee-like figure as a hanger-on, for instance, of a Clemens-like figure, then forced to drag down his own meal ticket/claim to fame, to save himself. And Pettite is an interesting figure in there, too. The other friend, whose instant admission makes things that much harder for our hero. But McNamee…it’s like those personal assistants to movie stars, who then end up suing or tazering them. What the hell is going on in those relationships? It’s an interesting area. And Clemens insanely vociferous denials. But that story’s not even over yet…People could actually go to jail over this one.

NM: Top 3 Sports movies of all time and why?

Moses: Friday Night Lights. Brutal. Realistic. Amazingly well acted and shot. Spawned kick-ass TV series.

Eight Men Out/Field of Dreams double feature. Break your heart twice.

Major League. Inexplicable soft spot.

NM: What baseball player do you most identify with and why?

Moses: Identify with? I don’t know. Cal Ripken Jr., maybe? I admire the consistency. In my line of work, you get good things done by steadily grinding it out, day after day. I’m all for flash too, obviously, but the really great work always rests on strong fundamentals, as it were.

NM: What’s next for you?

Moses: An evening of five of my short plays opens downtown at The Flea Theatre at the end of January. Then I will take a nap.