Bang The Drum Slowly

Steep Theatre Company

3902 N. Sheridan, Chicago, IL

http://www.steeptheatre.com/

 

There’s been a trend in theatre, more prominent in the last decade, where adaptations are not just being generated from the more common source, books, but are also drawing subject matter from movies.  This movie-to-theatre route is most pronounced in musicals (Hairspray, The Full Monty).  An elongated variation to this is book-to-movie-to-theatre (The Color Purple, Ragtime).

 

In Bang The Drum Slowly, we see the latter route: from book (written in 1956), to movie (1974) to this adaptation for the stage, first premiering at Evanston’s Next Theatre in 1992.

 

Bang The Drum Slowly is a baseball story.  It takes place during the regular season of an imaginary professional baseball team, the New York Mammoths.  One of the team’s pitchers, Author (the nickname derived from the fact that Author is also a writer), tells us the story of his on-the-road roommate, Bruce, a country-boy baseball catcher from Georgia. Bruce, as we soon find out, had been diagnosed with a fatal disease.  The play commences to delve into the ways Bruce, Author and the rest of the team struggle and react to the realities of this disease throughout the team’s baseball season.  This play has the potential of being a powerful piece, but unfortunately there are missed moments in this adaptation, especially in the second act, where the tensions and emotional struggles that imminent death can bring seemingly fizzle out. 

 

What saves this adaptation’s missteps, though, is superb direction by Tony Adams, who is also Steep Theatre’s co-artistic director.  This is Adams’ twentieth directing gig at Steep, and it is apparent that he knows the space well.  The staging is interesting and well-paced; the transitions are seamless. 

 

The acting is strong overall.  Alex Gillmor, playing Bruce, brings a nuanced combination of acceptance and despair, instilling a feeling of empathy rather than sympathy. Peter Moore, playing Author, skillfully shifts from relaying the story in the past tense, to his real-time character.  This is not an easy task to do, but Moore, with the guidance of Adams, pulls it off without a hitch.  Dutch, the Mustang’s coach, played by Jim Poole, is portrayed a bit over-the-top, thankfully not quite reaching the point of caricature.  (In an odd sense, though, this portrayal is an acceptable choice, as it brings a change in pace and energy to the over-all melancholic tension of the evening.)

 

A special mention must be given to the play’s accent coach, Nicole Pellegrino.  Bringing a piece together that encompasses the multitude of racially and culturally diverse characters surrounding a 1950’s baseball team is not an easy endeavor, but one never questions the actor’s accents and speech patterns throughout the entire play.

 

Bang The Drum Slowly is a large piece – 28 separate characters played by an 18-member cast.  It’s rather refreshing to see a theatre company tackle a play of this size, giving so many actors the experience of being on a Chicago stage.  Steep Theatre’s performance space is small, with seating for 40.  But rather than feeling cramped, the space is cozy and intimate, a fine example of Chicago store-front theatre at its best.

 

Rating: 3-stars

 

Reviewed by Scotty Zacher

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