Reviewed 11/7/04
For this season’s installment of the Desert Foothills Theatre’s Arizona Series, fledgling playwright Alexx Stuart’s Buzzard Ball has been sent to bat. The play is a lighthearted look at the Senior Softball Circuit in the Valley of the Sun and at the shenanigans of a perennially losing team, the Vultures. The misfits on the team suddenly gel when a new player joins them. I’m a supporter of new theatre, but I hesitate to call this script a theatre piece. What television writer Stuart has created is a joke-filled live sitcom that thunks like a ball off of an aluminum bat. It seems nothing more than an excuse to write as many jokes as possible. Stuart’s television background is evident in the sheer volume and varied subject matter of the jokes that are crammed into this piece. A short list includes: fat jokes; old jokes; young jokes; baseball jokes; Arizona jokes; Phoenix jokes; Cave Creek jokes; bad food jokes; rich jokes; poor jokes; senility jokes; trophy wife jokes; dumb blonde jokes; Stuart even finds a way to include a stroke joke. The preponderance of jokes ensures that the show will receive laughs. What it also ensures is a total lack of character development or a realistic plot. According to a couple who sat next to my wife and I who knew him when he was young, Stuart based these characters on people with whom he worked and played in the various softball leagues of his home in Minneapolis. If these are examples of his fellow players, it’s easy to see why a collection of two-dimensional characters never won a game. Strike one.
There is humor, though; lots and lots of jokey humor, enough to keep the audience laughing. This is a script written for Carefree, though. Rather than being for anyone who has played or watched baseball, as the press release insists, there are so many in-jokes that the script reads like it’s written only for Carefree residents who have participated in a fall softball league, a much smaller audience. This might have been enough to carry the show, but then there’s Todd G. Ortone’s direction, which relies on many, many bad choices. Half of the scenes take place on a softball field, centering on the stands where the wives of the players kibbutz, quarrel, and bond. However, when you direct a softball play about people watching softball, it isn’t theatre, it’s voyeurism. Ortone’s choices are limited, leaving people sitting and talking in the stands or at tables in a local watering hole, Dirty Larrys (Laura Fine has designed two large sets for this piece, making it a monumental effort to shift between them, and though this is unadvisable, it is successfully completed). The pacing is non-existent. This all might as well be viewed through a television camera lens. Even the near fistfights that erupt at various times have the energy of a pop fly. The only direction here is the myriad of ways the cast looks when they’re supposed to be watching someone hit a ball on the field. Ortone won’t be nominated for Manager of the Year for this effort. Strike two.
Finally, the ninth inning effort to resurrect this play is the cast. There are only three out of the twelve that bear mentioning in a positive light. Don Crosby’s Sarge is not bad, giving the audience what is expected of the character. Walt Pedano is a steady presence as Sonny. Diedre Kaye’s Ginger, Sonny’s wife, starts off as though she’ll stand out from the others, but she eventually succumbs to the generic construct of the character. The rest are sabotaged either by their limited character depth or by their inability to remember their lines, inexcusable by the end of the second weekend of the run. You can knock a line drive through many of the pauses and hesitations attempting to recover from flubbed lines and missed cues. An example of a victim of limited character is Andrea Pruseau, whose Alvina seems to have been directed to be the Carla Tortelli of Cave Creek. However, Hank Cipolaro’s team leader, Monty, appears to be the cause of many scenes that grind to a halt, awaiting saving from the awful improvisation that surrounds forgotten lines. Strike three, take a seat.
The strike ‘em out, throw ‘em out double play is turned when adding in the design element. While Fine’s sets are impressive, they are still too bulky. Christopher Rigney’s lighting is full of dead spots and calls attention to itself too often. Diedre Kaye’s costumes are fine, as is Christopher Scinto’s limited sound design.
Still, despite my protests, I must acknowledge that the three-quarter’s full Sunday matinee crowd laughed often. The script and production seems to have found their niche. I’m just not sure anyone outside of the Desert Foothills area needs to be the visiting team. The home team seems quite satisfied with this offering.
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