Theater Review: Back Back Back

by Ed Townley of John Garcia's The Column

The word 'steroids' is never mentioned – not once – in Back Back Back, the play by Itamar Moses that opened this week at the Dallas Theater Center. And the characters of Raul and Kent are never identified as Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, even though the details of their lives leave no doubt that the identification is intended. This is a play about denial, and throughout its nine "innings" (played with no intermission), the things the three characters go to great lengths not to say often resonate louder than the words we actually hear.

Ostensibly a play about baseball, Back Back Back is really a study of the insidious effects of fear, greed, insecurity and pressure to perform. Three promising ballplayers – each a onetime Rookie of the Year, teammates when we first meet them – follow different career paths as they move individually from season to season, from team to team, from injury to recovery. The carefully unspoken issue that haunts each career is the use – or not – of performance-enhancing drugs.

Raul is a fun-loving Trickster who has no qualms about using his special "vitamins," and about encouraging others to do the same. His injury-plagued career culminates in the publication of a 'tell all' book in which he defiantly defends his own steroid use and names the names of other players with whom he shared his 'vitamins.' Adam, the youngest and most naïve of the three, foregoes the drugs – and watches his once-promising career descend into mediocrity against the steroid-enhanced skills of other players.

The central figure is Kent, a charismatic and popular player who sees early on the downside to steroid use that Raul shrugs off. Yet under the pressure of achieving and maintaining a stellar career, he turns to the drugs for help with strength and power. Like any tragic hero, he first rises high. He breaks Babe Ruth's longstanding homerun record, and is credited with almost single-handedly restoring baseball's popularity after a destructive players' strike. But the negative consequences of his choices quickly take their toll, and Raul's book provides the final blow.

In Moses' script the stories unfold on the surface; what little we end up knowing about the individual ballplayers comes largely from the three gifted actors who bring them to life. Much of the drama unfolds offstage or between scenes – sorry, innings – and having at least a basic familiarity with recent baseball history will help keep things clear. Players strike, owners connive, marriages crumble – but the most we get are grudging mentions from three men whose conversations are masterpieces of avoidance and denial. I longed for a scene or two with a wife, or manager, or owner – someone who could pierce the denial and bring the human costs to life.

At the same time, the avoidance and denial are often painfully funny, and director Hal Brooks skillfully mines every laugh and nuance as the three actors strut and pose and alternately support and challenge each other's evasions and lies. Juan Javier Cardenas as Raul is both funny and unnerving as he gleefully flaunts his bad-boy status, both to the other players and, in the most demanding and hilarious of the play's several monologues, to the press (represented by the audience) in pre- and post-game locker room rants. Dennis Staroselsky is warm and sympathetic as the frustrated and disillusioned Adam, whose caustic humor becomes increasingly bitter as events unfold. And Will Fowler is terrific as Kent, torn between an innate sense of decency and a fear-based hunger for success.

Production credits for Back Back Back are excellent throughout. The scenic design of Takeshi Kata perfectly captures the superficial differences and underlying sameness as players are traded and re-traded, and the focus shifts from one ballpark to another. It all conveys an energy of innate dreariness; but there's a terrific final scenic effect that suggests just how majestic these same ballparks can seem from a different perspective. Claudia Stephens' costumes are effective, particularly in the subtle humor she brings to the 'civilian clothes' Kent and Raul are wearing for an appearance before a Congressional committee.

If Back Back Back falls short of being a grand slam home run, the shortfall lies in the script, not the production. It's a little too tentative, content to present the surface of a compelling story without digging deep. The playwright seems as reluctant to let loose and express a true voice as his three characters are. Still, as Kent explains in the course of the play, it's a mistake to demand nothing but homers – or to try to hit it out of the park in every at-bat. A solid, well placed base hit offers its own rich rewards. The same holds true, I think, in theater as well.

Back Back Back will entertain you and, perhaps, cause you to think just a bit. And in these days, when it's becoming painfully clear that the same willingness to break the rules for the sake of an immediate payoff was as endemic on Wall Street as in baseball, it's good to listen, laugh, grieve a bit for what's been lost – and realize that for better or worse, the game goes on.

Back Back Back runs through April 5. Purchase tickets online or by calling 214-522-8499.