COBB
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There’s rarely any action in these plays. Just conversation, reminiscing, and the occasional argument. Blessing uses this stripped-down, bare-bones approach to cut to the core of some weighty issues. The genial discussions between American and Soviet arms negotiators in A Walk in the Woods provide rare insight into the psychological underpinnings of the cold war. The monologues and conversations of three generations of superachieving women in Eleemosynary effectively illuminate the struggles children face in trying to meet the lofty expectations of their parents. But in Cobb, now in its Chicago premiere at the Raven Theatre, the technique that has served Blessing so well falls flat. His attempt to use the story of baseball great Ty Cobb to examine the dangers of fame, the ravages of time, and the dark side of the American dream feels labored, ultimately collapsing under the weight of its pompous ideas.
Tyrus Raymond Cobb was certainly a fascinating figure in the annals of baseball history. He was perhaps the best ever to play the game, but he was also a mean-spirited, ultracompetitive SOB who boasted of spiking catchers as he slid into home. He beat the crap out of fellow players, a hotel chambermaid, an equipment manager, and even a crippled fan who called him a “half nigger.” Baseball scholars attribute Cobb’s ferocious, take-no-prisoners play to his demanding father, who told Cobb before he embarked on his baseball career, “Don’t come home a failure,” and was eventually shot to death by Cobb’s mother.
So it’s a credit to the highly talented Charles Glenn that he comes off better than any of the other actors in the sketchily written role of Charleston. The others–Davidson Cole, Bill McGough, and Chuck Spencer as the young, middle-aged, and elderly Cobbs respectively–acquit themselves well but cannot rise above the preachy script. Martha Lukens has reproduced Cobb’s and Charleston’s uniforms with painstaking accuracy, and Michael Menendian’s direction is clean and professional, but there is little that can be done to salvage this dull 80-minute play.
