‘Play to ‘Win’ Hits a Home Run

A certain irony exists in the fact that less than two weeks after baseball’s suspension of Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott for her use of racial and ethnic slurs--and after renewed controversy about racial equity in the sport itself--a theater company from New York is touring the Southland with a musical about the man who broke baseball’s color barrier

At its first tour stop, Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, Theatreworks/USA, noted for its portable, high-caliber family theater productions, hits a home run with “Play to Win.” This deceptively simple, fast-moving musical is about Jackie Robinson, who made history in 1947 when Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey took him out of the segregated Negro League and signed him to the majors.

Baseball, the All-American sport? “That’s not the way it was by a long shot,” says Robert Chew as baseball legend Satchel Paige. Paige serves as narrator, taking the audience through 10 years of Robinson’s life, culminating in his joining the Dodgers.

Written by James de Jongh and Carles Cleveland, with lyrics by Jimi Foster, De Jongh and Cleveland and music by Foster, the play is a series of vignettes featuring strong performances by Chew, Daver Morrison, Anita Davenport, Christopher Hartmann and Curtis Harwell.

There is no color barrier in the cast; except for Morrison, who plays Robinson, the five-member ensemble of African-American and white actors each portray characters of both colors, alerting the audience to who’s who by casually donning a black cap or a white one. (Davenport not only plays Robinson’s supportive wife, Rachel, but several male roles as well.)

Directed by Bruce Butler, the play frankly, but without exploitation, portrays the kind of institutionalized bigotry that targeted people of color in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Just as clearly it shows Robinson as an articulate, well-educated and gifted athlete who was angrily intolerant of the limitations racism placed upon him.

White characters target him with racial slurs. Others try to cover up why, for example, he and his wife are bumped off a flight to Dodgers spring training or why the hotel where they are to honeymoon suddenly has no room.

It is also made clear that Robinson’s major league career was a bittersweet victory: opposing team members played vicious tricks on him, and he and his family were flooded with hate mail and death threats, yet, although it made him physically ill, Robinson somehow took the abuse without fighting back. A reaction was what the hatemongers wanted, to prove that a black player wasn’t qualified to be on a white team.

Despite its seriousness, the show and its upbeat music have a celebratory vitality. The cast is satisfyingly professional: Chew in particular offers a salty, knowing fillip as Paige, while Morrison gives the audience a hint of Robinson’s passionate complexity.

Although preschoolers are too young for the show, it gives parents a perfect opportunity to open a dialogue with older children about racism and discrimination.

“Play to Win,” Theatreworks/USA. Saturday at 3 and 7:30 p.m.: Lancaster Performing Arts Center, (805) 723-5951; $5-$10. Sunday at 2 and 4 p.m.: Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara, (805) 963-0761; $6.50-$9.50. Feb. 26, 7:30 p.m.: Victor Valley College, (619) 245-4271, Ext. 454; $3-$5.