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March 2004 - 15 May 2004 Evening Performances: Monday - Saturday 7.30pm Saturday Matinees: 3, 10, 17, 24 April, 1, 8 and 15 May 3.30pm Mid-Week Matinees: 29 April 3.30pm Royal Court Theatre Back to GA.ws |
By Ray Bennett (April 6, 2004) Bottom line: Gillian Anderson hits a home run in an offbeat riff on fame and acclaim. A tiny, waiflike creature strolls silently onto a wide, spare stage, with the audience still settling and chattering and then suddenly becoming quiet. There is a window to the rear of what is a painter's gallery, and the young woman stares from it for a long time and then comes to the front, where her brilliant television eyes make us think we know this person. But any thought of Dana Scully from "The X-Files" quickly evaporates as Gillian Anderson presents us with another Dana, an artist whose tousled, tied-up hair draws back from a face filled with the misery of failure. In Rebecca Gilman's ambitiously offbeat play "The Sweetest Swing in Baseball," Dana is a successful painter who has lost her vision. The showing of her latest works has been a flop, and her agent and art dealer flap around her with the useless babble of middlemen. Then her previously stalwart boyfriend finally decides that he'd rather sit alone on an empty floor in a small apartment than live with her. Depression strikes, and Dana slits her wrists. Discovered in time by her boyfriend, she is sent to recover at a clinic where she spurns the serotonin reuptake inhibitors the doctors rush to prescribe but finds solace in the clinic's dull routine and inspiration from two fellow patients. Michael (Demetri Goritsas) is a gay recovering alcoholic doing his second detox, and Gary (John Sharian) is a violent sociopath in for life because of his obsessive desire to murder a CNN newsreader. When Dana's medical insurers say they won't pay for her to be there longer than 10 days, she decides to fake schizophrenia, choosing the unlikely character of trouble-prone baseball star Darryl Strawberry as her alternate personality. At that point, the play might easily have descended into absurdity, but the reverse occurs as this outlandish premise becomes the fuel for Dana to rediscover her artistic drive and to fight the parasites and hypocrites that success inevitably attracts. Gilman demeans Strawberry not at all in seeing the humor in a white, painterly and very feminine young woman trying to take on the heft of a brilliant if troubled black athlete. Dana knows nothing of him except what her friends in the clinic tell her. At first, hearing of Strawberry's drug demons and falls from grace, she decides that he's "the most depressing baseball player on the planet." But as she learns more about him, she starts to believe in the sweetest swing, and soon she finds she'd rather be Darryl than Dana. Not only that, but as Darryl she discovers a renewed passion for painting, and her works are acclaimed again. There's a deliciously subversive touch to Gilman's work here, and director Ian Rickson and star Anderson get it entirely. All the players are good, with Goritsas managing the difficult, sympathetic role of the gay alcoholic with appealing humor. Kate Harper and Nancy Crane fawn and bristle convincingly as the dealers whose faith in the hollowness of the art world is exposed by Dana/Darryl's honesty. Sharian is outstanding as the psychotic stalker, a far different kind of sociopath from the movies; he's well medicated and indulgent of others' extremes. With superb comic timing, Sharian delivers a wonderful speech about wannabes whose voluble praise hides envy and resentment. Best of all is Anderson, who is onstage for all but a few seconds. She understands that she's not impersonating Strawberry; it's only Dana who wants to believe she can be him too. It's a completely winning performance that builds to a final shout of defiance against the robbers of joy and despoilers of souls, and she hollers it with belief and fierce humor: "Fuckers!" |
