Back, Back, Back
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.
