The Brotherhood's Revolt and Baseball At The Pyramids

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I'm back on Deadspin today, with a bit of forgotten baseball history that I've been digging into for the last few months. It's got it all: moustaches, old-fashioned racism, and a cloak-and-dagger labor war. What more could you want?

The bulletin was posted on the evening of February 8, 1889, in the lobby of Cairo's Hotel d'Orient:

Base-ball at the Pyramids. The Chicago and All-America teams, comprising the Spalding base-ball party, will please report in the hotel office, in uniform, promptly at ten o'clock to-morrow morning. We shall leave for the hotel at that hour, camels having been provided for the All-Americas and donkeys for the Chicago players, with carriages for the balance of the party. The Pyramids will be inspected, the Sphinx visited, and a game played upon the desert near by, beginning at 2 o'clock.

Around the notice huddled 20 travel-weary ballplayers, baseball missionaries brought by Albert Spalding to spread the national pastime around the globe. They had traveled from Hawaii to Australia, from Ceylon to the Suez, exhibiting their game—and Spalding's sporting equipment—whenever they got the chance. In Australia they had played for thousands, but in Cairo they were curiosities who passed their time like all American travelers: shopping in the bazaars, screaming at beggars and complaining about the food. Tomorrow would come an exhibition that nobody asked for, which remains one of the strangest in the history of American sport.

Among them was one whose mind was not on sightseeing. John Montgomery Ward—shortstop, lawyer, and president of the nascent players' union—was transfixed by a short item in the American newspaper, the first he had seen in months, which said that the National League had taken advantage of his absence to enact a salary cap that would cut his income in half. As his teammates prepared to greet the Sphinx, the most remarkable mind in baseball was taking the first steps to a revolution.

Leave Anna Alone!

Was it dumb of me to expect nuance from Anna Nicole? The opera, which is currently playing a too-short run at BAM, was well-reviewed when it opened in London last year, and has been eagerly anticipated (by me) for the last few months. Although some were confused by Marc-Anthony Turnage's chosen subject, it made perfect sense to me. Anna Nicole Smith was a beautiful woman—truly—who wanted wealth and destroyed herself in the pursuit of it, becoming fodder for late-night jokes and endless lawsuits. In 2006, she gave birth to a daughter and lost a son within three days, and died six months later. What could be more operatic than that?

The only pitfall would be if Richard Thomas's libretto failed to take Anna seriously. British critiques of American culture don't always play well on this side of the Atlantic, and any sense that the all-British team was making fun of their exceptionally American hero would be sure to turn me off. The Times  promised I would not be disappointed:

The three creators, all British, certainly had fun depicting Smith’s tawdry American life and skewering reality television. But their Anna emerged as an improbable operatic heroine; a restless woman yearning to escape her backwater birthplace, Mexia, Tex.; a striver determined to get ahead and raise a son in any way possible. Isn’t this the American dream?

I don't know what opera they were watching. Anna Nicole gave me a sick feeling from the first scenes, when her family is introduced as a gang of toothless, comic hicks. The Tennessean in me is highly sensitive to this kind of thing, but I'd like to think that the atrociously sung Southern accents would have made any audience member uneasy. That the comedy of the play's first part is built on jokes about Walmart, fried chicken and spousal abuse bother me not as an overproud southerner, but because they're lazy cracks. An opera should do better.

More troubling is the play's treatment of its heroine, who lacks the mad, irresistible ambition that defines most great operatic heroines. Instead, she is unassuming, dimwitted, and powerless. The only moment when the production slows down long enough to take her yearning seriously is in the moments after she's gotten her breast implants—a flimsy plastic-looking prosthetic that made Sarah Joy Miller look like one of the "sexy" mannequins that appear in costume shop windows around Halloween. (NSFW, I guess, if your boss thinks mannequins are erotic.)

From there, Anna Nicole shows no interest in the possibility that Anna might have been playing a part to get what she wanted. Her 89 year-old meal ticket, played by the powerful tenor Robert Brubaker, sings of his love for Anna's "baby voice," which might have been interesting if she hadn't been using a baby voice throughout. As a substitute for depth, Anna has chronic back pain—penance paid for her oversized implants, suggesting that breast augmentation wasn't just her original sin, but the whole of her character. She jumps up and down when given jewelry, she fawns over bodybuilders, she uses an on-stage toilet and walks away from it with toilet paper trailing from her butt. This is not a flattering portrayal.

The fat suit she dons for the plays conclusion, which was more exaggerated than Jenna Maroney's , was the most obvious indication that Thomas and Turnage had missed the point of their heroine's decline. Anna Nicole Smith did gain weight, and lost it and gained it again, but she was never obese. She was tacky and embarrassing the way that any painkiller addict might be if put on television, and the American tabloid media is quick to label any star who's gained weight a whale. That the opera goes along with that depiction told me that they were unable to find any interiority for Anna, and instead went along with the popular narrative of her life and death. Because that was such a hateful narrative, we are given a hateful opera.

In an interview with New York , Turnage said “If I’m really honest, I’m quite uncomfortable with it now. I don’t think we were trying to be cruel. But it’s mocking someone’s real life. I wouldn’t do it again.”

That discomfort shows. Rather than taking their heroine serious from the first scene, Turnage and Thomas let the audience laugh at Anna for the first 90 minutes of the production, and then try to change course just at the end. Unsurprisingly, that half-hearted approach fails. 

At the end of her opera, Anna laments her mistakes. "I was wrong," she sings. "I was weak." It's impossible to imagine Turandot or Carmen or even Madame Butterfly being so apologetic. It wouldn't have taken much imagination to make Anna Nicole Smith's already tragic story larger than life. Anna Nicole , sadly, is much smaller than it.

One Review And Two Heartfelt Bits of Sporpswriting

Been lying awake at night wondering what sorts of things I've been writing? Well, for one thing I just finished a rough draft of a heist play about Parisian chefs. (If you want to read it, let me know. It's good!) But as far as writing for money goes, well, I've been doing a bit of that. For instance, this pulse-pounding review of A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About The Death of Walt Disney , which wowed audiences last month at Soho Rep.

We shouldn't be surprised that Walt Disney has something up his sleeve. He is a showman, after all, and a showman always keeps something clever in reserve. So when Walt—moustachioed, imperial and cruel—takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, it's natural that it will turn into three, four, seven or eight more. They tumble out of his sleeve, falling to the floor, but somewhere the trick has gone wrong. The hankies are covered in blood. The showman is beginning to die.

Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading Of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, which opened May 9 at Soho Rep and runs through June 9, is a poetic examination of a famous magician's attempt to execute the greatest trick of all: immortality. It's an audacious gambit, and it's clear from the first scene—and the presence of "Death" in the play's title—that he probably won't pull it off. But watching him try has proven one of the most engaging theatrical experiences of the spring.

Pretty good, eh? I've also been doing a bit of writing for The Classical , the website responsible for coining the word sporps—a wacky neologism that I somehow can't seem to get out of my head. For instance, I wrote this appreciation of Mets fringe player Mike Baxter—a sad-faced local kid who was, tragically, demoted on Sunday.

On a pleasant Friday afternoon last April, Mike Baxter misplayed a fly ball. The Mets were on their way to a 4-0 loss to the Phillies, playing the halfhearted and thunderously mediocre baseball that has been their trademark in 2013, when the fly came Baxter’s way. It was a long run, and could have been highlight-reel worthy had he successfully slid to catch it, but Baxter broke late, arriving just in time for the ball to roll towards his shoes. From right field came the shout: “You’re a piece of shit, Baxter!”

The heckler wore a Yankee hat, but even without that, it would have been obvious he wasn’t there to cheer on the Mets. Met fans love Mike Baxter, with the dull, unconditional affection usually reserved for pets, or a favorite, fading t-shirt with stains and a few expanding holes. It’s a love too rare in stadiums. The Yankee fan, after an inning or two cursing the hangdog right fielder, disappeared to watch the Knick game. But the Met fans did not turn away. In the seventh inning, when it was clear the Mets had no interest in winning that night, two young women serenaded Baxter, hollering, “Hey Mike! You’re gorgeous! We love you, Mike!”

Read mas, if you have a moment. It's probably the best thing I wrote last month, if you don't count my famously engaging grocery lists. Also for The Classical , I did an impression of someone who is qualified to write about soccer, producing this (I think pretty nifty) article about John Isner.

During the last weekend of May, New York got walloped with the first heat wave of summer: three days of humidity and haze dense and unremitting enough to make ordinary men sympathize with David Berkowitz. From the moment I stepped out of the climate controlled sanctuary of my bedroom and into a wall of stale, broiling air, the afternoon was doomed. I slithered onto the sofa, dragging a wheelbarrow of iced coffee behind me, and turned on the French Open. I seldom watch tennis, but it just felt right.

This is an urge I hadn’t had, if I’m being honest, since the last time my apartment did its convection oven impression, during last year’s U.S. Open. When warm weather strikes I find it soothing to watch attractive people grunt, leap, and yell at line judges. This doesn’t seem to need defending, but so rudimentary is my knowledge of the sport that it took me until last year to piece together what a break point is—a mystery I might have solved faster if I weren’t so committed to watching tennis only when hungover, heat-stroked or both.

Because it’s free of the grave mythology that bogs down American team sports, tennis can be easy to like and hard to love. I can get quickly invested in a game of football, basketball, or hockey, even if I don’t care about either team. Just pick a uniform, a city, a player to hate, and bellow until one group of meatheads crushes the other. But in tennis, the focus is too close. Those are real people out there—beautiful, talented, mostly European people. What the hell could they have to do with me?

What the hell, indeed. Find out more!

I'll be out of town for the next couple of weeks, so feel free to drunk a hogshead of whiskey and drunkbernate until I return.

Let's Talk About Ghosts; Let's Talk About Set Design

The current revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is not, in my opinion, as bad as the critics think. While I found the mishmash of Southern accents and off-stage servants' chorus distracting, I also found a lot to like with this lush, not-terribly-subtle production. Mostly, I loved the set—a dreamy fantasy of life in the aristocratic south whose soaring windows wouldn't feel out of place at the Met Opera. Some critics complained that the massive space distracted from the intimacy that is at the play's heart, but to them I blow a raspberry. The set was gorgeous—it was the directing (and sound design) that's caused the play problems.

This morning, I spoke to designer Christopher Oram, the genial Englishman responsible for the play's scenery. He had a lot of interesting stuff to say, and got quite passionate when I asked him about the choice, in previews, to experiment with having the ghost of Brick's friend Skipper lurk about on stage.

There was a lot of anger about it. It was anger! There was something vile that man wrote, reporting hearsay, but it created such a riot, an absolute riot, and after that it became very hard. A dozen reviews mentioned it, even though it wasn’t in the version of the play they saw. It became a bit of industry gossip, baggage those reviewers brought in when they saw the play.

The point is, Skipper is in the play. He’s mentioned constantly. He’s the third part of the triangle. Having him there really helped Scarlett and Ben [Walker, who plays Brick] establish the weirdness of their relationship. The removal of it didn’t change their relationship.

I’m saddened that one isn’t allowed to experiment. If we’d done it on opening night and it had been removed and we’d gotten the flak, then fair enough. But isn’t that the point of previews? With the Internet, literally the first performance becomes public property. This also makes the critics slightly redundant., if a critic brings that gossip, that baggage into the review.

As much fun as everyone had laughing at the idea of Skipper's ghost, I think there's something to like about a big-budget production having the good sense to admit it was wrong before opening night. No sense punishing a show that's already admitted a mistake.

Read the rest of the interview here. It's a good one.

Off Broadway And The Five Decade Headache

I'm planning a long post for either later in the week or later today about the history of the term "off off Broadway," and the fact that it is an indisputably awful mouthful. Look forward to it—my trenchant analysis and amateurish research will both amuse and disgust you.

In the meantime, I turned up a May 5, 1957 Times article which appears to be the first time the paper used the term. At the end of a long article complaining about the woes of Off Broadway producers:

One steady observer of off Broadway drama suggested that what was needed was off-off Broadway. As a matter of fact, there is a troupe that calls itself the "Way Off Broadway Players."

Since this was the Old Gray Lady's first use of the phrase, they had yet to settle on the house style, which calls for capital Os when it's used as a noun or an adjective—"An Off Broadway producer," "Off Off Broadway is flourishing,"—but teeny-weeny Os when it's serving as an adverb—"The play was performed off Broadway." Oh, and never hyphenate it.

Anybody who doesn't own the Times Manual of Style and Usage is a chump.

More interesting than these five decade old copy-quibbles is the fact that the complaints of Off Broadway producers have not changed at all—they are still caught between artistic ambition and the nightmarish realization that, "the path to quality is paved with producers' greenbacks."

A few quick figures illustrate the situation. In 1953, a play, "Climate of Eden," was opened for $500. Today the average cost is between $7,000 and $15,000, with $20,000 no longer unusual. The revival of "Johnny Johnson," which ran for seventeen performances, cost $40,000. One of the most experienced off-Broadway producers estimated recently that of approximately 600 off-Broadway productions in the last five years, not more than twenty had made a profit.

That forty grand, internet inflation calculators will tell you, is over $300,000 today. It's been a long time since producing off Broadway was cheap.

Various scourges are blamed. The producers of the '50s criticize the rent charged by theater owners—as high as $800 a week in Eisenhower-bucks—they rage about Actors' Equity wage demands—$40 to $70 weekly—and they complain that competition among the thirty or so Off Broadway houses has forced them to raise standards and spend money in desperate hope that their show will be a hit and transfer to Broadway. "Each producer," reporter Murray Schumach tells us, "clings to the hope that his project will be another 'End as a Man,' 'The Iceman Cometh,' 'The Threepenny Opera,' 'Way of the World,' 'Uncle Vanya' or 'Purple Dust.'"

Those titles reflect one thing about the Off Broadway of old that surprised me—a heavy reliance on "the vastness of literary public domain, where prestige is high and royalties non-existent." This was a day when new plays could find a home on Broadway, and didn't need to take refuge below Fourteenth Street. What was on stage might have been old fashioned, but the front of house headaches have hardly changed at all.