Charles M. Schulz’s biography describes Charlie Brown as a lovable loser, a child possessed of endless determination and hope but who is ultimately dominated by his insecurities and a permanent case of bad luck.
Gary Zipnik, the hapless protagonist in Ken Weitzman’s rousing new comedy, “The Catch,” is Charlie Brown all grown up … with Archie Bunker for a father and Jimmy “J.J.” Walker looking over his shoulder. And as sit-comy as that sounds, it mostly works.
“The Catch,” now being staged as a Denver Center Theater Company world premiere, is a fastball of fresh air from its first pitch. And like the crack of an aluminum bat on a winter morning, when it makes contact, it shoots stingers of truth down your arm.
It’s an impeccably performed comedy — often riotously so — but also a biting commentary on all manner of American hypocrisies, pop-culture contradictions and racial injustices from slavery to Japanese internment.
Weitzman sprays his targets like a slugger hitting the ball to all fields. And at the same time, he manages with the deftness of Frank Deford to both eloquently honor baseball’s timeless place in the American family — and abuse us for continuing to buy into its myths.
The play is set in the Bay Area in 2002. Gary is a dreamer whose life is a nightmare. His dot-com startup has gone bust, taking his house and wife with it. Now moving in with him, as if only to remind Gary what a failure every inning of his life has been, is his diabetic dad, Sid, a surly old bigot made lovable by Mike Hartman, an actor who always manages to bat 1.000.
Gary is down but, like a comic archetype facing down Lucy Van Pelt and her football, he keeps on swinging. His apartment is strewn with Post-it notes with motivational quotes by everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Homer Simpson. He convinces himself that when slugger Darryl Love soon breaks baseball’s all-time home-run record, he’ll be there to catch it, sell it for $3 million and, thus, get his wife, house and old life back. It’s a pathetic, pie-in-the-sky plan — and a quintessentially American instant-wealth scheme.
And we fully invest in it, thanks to a carefully crafted performance by Ian Merrill Peakes as Gary that always straddles the line between delusional optimism and utter despair. In Peakes’ remarkably mitted hands, Gary isn’t just a comic-strip Charlie Brown. He’s every 1850s gold prospector, every dot-com venture capitalist, every sucker who took out a subprime mortgage in the past decade. He’s every self-starter who has ever taken a chance on the American Dream, and gone bust. And tried again. Because it’s intrinsic to our American story that, for every million Gary Zipniks, there will be one Mark Zuckerberg.
Acting as a one-man chorus through all this is one of the most original characters to batter up to an American stage. He’s the charismatic, truth-telling Darryl Love, a brash young black man of privilege, blinding bling and a big mouth. Strutting around in everything from full uniform to a mere shower towel, Love speaks brazenly … and carries a big stick. He’s here to tell you that the America Dream is built on lies. That he has nonetheless achieved it — spectacularly — is an irony lost on only Love himself. Playing Love, Nicoye Banks owns the stage like Deion Sanders owns a camera.
Though baseball is thought of as a sport for fathers and sons like Gary and Sid, Weitzman expands the tapestry with a corresponding Japanese-American mother and son: Michael and Ruth Nomura, who find themselves as Gary’s unlikely adversaries. Ruth (a wonderful Wai-Ching Ho) is another utterly original character — a retired Japanese baseball fanatic.
It turns out that Gary and Michael (Pun Bandhu) have much more in common than baseball. For a play about the diamond, “The Catch” turns out to be much more about triangles.
It’s a provocative and accessible tale that easily wins audiences over with a storytelling style that’s uncommonly playful until it’s just … not anymore.
As if determined to establish a greater dramatic relevance than it needs, the final 20 minutes are akin to beating the audience over the head with a baseball bat.
Upon exiting, one woman wondered aloud, “How did they manage to take such a funny play … and turn it into the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen?”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
Watch the Denver Center’s “10 Minutes to Curtain” episode”
“The Catch” *** (out of four stars)
Baseball comedy. Presented by the Denver Center Theatre Company at the Space Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Written by Ken Weitzman. Directed by Lou Jacob. Through Feb. 26. 2 hours, 15 minutes. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $10-$67. 303-893-4100 (800-641-1222 outside Denver) or
