Steroids and Stereotypes

Stage

BASEBALL, ITAMAR MOSES SAYS, is “quintessentially American.” Accordingly, he considers Back Back Back, his new play about steroid use in the diamond sport, also an allegory. “It’s about wanting everything but having it cost nothing,” he says. “We want to have heroes and want them to be pure. Being human, of course, they’re not.”

Back, set in the 1990s, concerns three players trying to decide whether to use steroids. “It’s a potent dramatic situation,” says the playwright, “because there’s no easy answer or right choice.” As subsequent investigations showed, steroid use in baseball——which hadn’t banned such drugs——became especially prevalent in the years after 1994 as the national pastime struggled to regain public favor after a long strike that canceled the World Series.

“Everyone was sort of complicit,” Moses says, and so many players and teams believed they had to “juice” to remain competitive. “But ‘Everyone is doing it’ isn’t a sound ethical argument.” His script’s three players represent the spectrum of thought about the question.

He felt particularly affected by the steroid controversy because he’s “passionate about baseball” and his favorite team is the San Francisco Giants. On that team, as fans know well, was Barry Bonds, probably the most famous——and most talented——player tainted by the steroid scandal. As the unsavory revelations expanded, Moses says with a laugh, he decided to regard the Giants as just “a good friend in an abusive relationship.”

In February 2007, the Old Globe premiered Moses’ last work, The Four of Us. It won the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle’s Craig Noel Award as outstanding new play and went on to be produced around the country, including off-Broadway. This June, Moses was named a Globe playwright-in-residence.

Back (September 19–October 26) is the second production in the temporary arena stage in the San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium. The “black box,” in-the-round space is similar to, and a worthy substitute for, the razed Cassius Carter. Best of all, the chairs provide more comfort than those cramped Carter seats. When the Globe’s new theater is ready in 2010, the auditorium will be restored.

TOBACCO ROAD was a phenomenon in the 1930s, first as a controversial Erskine Caldwell novel, then as an equally contentious play, adapted by Jack Kirkland. The latter was trashed by critics but praised by audiences so much that it ran from 1933 to 1941, setting a Broadway-run record that lasted for decades. (It’s still ranked 15th.)

Yet while the novel became an American classic, the play practically disappeared from stages. Reasons are obvious. It requires a large cast, and the story is dark, involving a destitute and desperate family of Georgia sharecroppers scraping to survive in the Depression. It——like other Caldwell works spotlighting race, class and gender issues——provoked widespread censure for its harsh portrayal of Southern life, including graphic sexuality and violence. That, plus its mordant humor, elicited accusations of stereotyping Southerners as ignorant hillbillies.

Clearly, it’s a major challenge to a director, and one that David Schweizer had long wanted to tackle. He suggested it to his pal, La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley, who liked the idea and put Tobacco Road on his first Playhouse schedule (September 30–October 26, Mandell Weiss Forum).

“It tickles me,” Schweizer says, “that this famous old American play, which is radical and provocative, has been presented so few times.” Still, he recognizes that “the audaciousness of it” means that “it’s a lot for audiences to handle.” The sad, often crude story——he describes it as “poignant, almost Gothic”——deals with questionable morality, social and sexual, that often offends. Consequently, as in the final years of the Broadway run and the 1941 Tobacco Road film, it gets played mostly for laughs.

Some stage revivals, wrestling with the script’s 1930s-era crudity and cruelty, have attempted to update it. But Schweizer plans to use the original script “as written in the period, with maybe some cuts.” Thus, he hopes, its underlying message of survival among the poor will resonate as strongly today.

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