For more than a century, nothing but nothing has brought out the shameless sentiment in writers like baseball. Everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Red Smith has taken a swing at distilling the romantic essence of the game into words. Most have missed.
Sometimes it’s poetry, like when Richard Greenberg described baseball as “unrelentingly meaningful” in his Tony-winning play, “Take Me Out.” Or when “Field of Dreams” captured the transformative emotional power of the game by simply showing a father and a son having a (postmortem) catch.
More often than not, though, writers resort to overwrought prose, nostalgic sap and outright thievery in their unending quest to pen the next “Casey at the Bat.”
“Honus and Me” is one of those. (Stay with me.) Colorado native Steven Dietz falls into every conceivable trap in his unabashedly naive and cliche-ridden homage to boys and baseball. (Stay with me.) It’s derivative of a dozen stories that came before it, is simplistic in its characters, cartoonish in its villainy and has bigger plot holes than the left-center gap at Coors Field. It even resorts to a shameless audience-participation round of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
Still with me? Good, because to many among the Aurora Fox’s adoring audiences, “Honus and Me” is also a home run. That much was as obvious after Sunday’s matinee as a Matt Holliday walk-off dinger.
That’s partly because the Fox is attracting the perfect audience for this play. Sunday, it was primarily thoroughly engaged teenage boys wearing their Little League uniforms. “Honus and Me” is one of those tweener plays that’s slightly more sophisticated than typical children’s theater, so it’s serving an otherwise underserved audience. But it’s being offered not within its children’s series but as a mainstage adult play.
“Honus and Me” is based on Dan Gutman’s popular novel about a meek and glum boy who, for a pine- rider, sure finds himself staring down at a lot of game-deciding at-bats (all of which he blows, of course). His parents have split over issues of money but, voila: The boy finds the most valuable baseball card in the world in his old neighbor lady’s attic, and he naively believes it will solve all their problems.
When not being pursued by an eye-rolling thug for this card, Joey somehow manages to summon the man on it. He plucks Pittsburg (no h!) great Honus Wagner out of the 1909 World Series and into 2008 Steel City.
What happens next is utterly predictable but still very sweet, thanks to Tupper Cullum’s no-nonsense portrayal of the baseball god who can’t believe two bits won’t get you a meal anymore. If you don’t think Honus will soon build the boy’s esteem and his baseball skills, or that you’ll be pitched a few afterschool-special lessons along the way, you belong on the theatrical bench.
Dietz also takes many disappointing storytelling shortcuts by having the boy break out of the action to narrate chunks of the story, which confuses past and present and violates the cardinal “show, don’t tell” rule of playwriting.
Director John Ashton’s family- friendly staging is fluid but awkward throughout, namely because of his decision to cast his sad-sack teen with an adult actor. The excellent Jack Wefso was the quintessential teen Charlie Brown in The Avenue’s hailed “Dog Sees God,” and it seems as if he’s been asked to basically re- create the role here.
But all of the other kids are played by kid actors, and it’s just plain odd seeing this man constantly and cruelly abused by urchins a foot shorter than he is. Urchins he could squash. And the poor guy has been directed to deliver every aw-shucks line in the script with the same fervor as if he were announcing to the audience that the theater’s on fire.
If “Honus and Me” were being presented as children’s theater, the point’s moot. Maybe it is anyway. Audiences clearly aren’t judging it the way any critic would. Its positive messages, lack of cynicism and indefatigable spirit win the day. Wefso’s likable, Cullum’s impeccable and even 80-year-old Bev Newcomb-Madden is as feisty as ever as the neighbor lady with a deep affinity for baseball — and a surprising past.
So what if it’s not the next “Field of Dreams”? What’s more surprising is that as steroids and other scandals continue to erode baseball’s innocence, writers like Dietz still so passionately believe in the nostalgic appeal of the sport at its essence.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Honus and Me” | ** (out of four stars)
Adolescent coming of age. Aurora Fox, 9990 E. Colfax Ave.Adapted by Steven Dietz. Through July 20. 1 hour, 45 minutes. 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. $12-$24. 303-739-1970, .
