As a play about art and America’s pasttime, Milwaukee Chamber Theater couldn’t have picked a better weekend to open The Sweetest Swing in Baseball. Gallery Night energy was in the Third Ward air, and the Brewer’s were just getting their season started. Rebecca Gilman’s 2006 play was hardly celebratory, though. A character study about one woman’s struggle with creativity and identity amid the pressures of the art world, Gilman’s play finds its footing early with a series of deftly rendered scenes which sketch in the world in which Dana Fielding travels. At first, it’s the high-pressure big-city art world, with fatuous dealers and merciless critics. Then, it’s the very different world of a psychiatric hospital (or is it?), where Fielding finds herself after a suicide attempt. Here’s where Gilman’s dialogue really crackles and director Michael Wright finding the perfect balance of comic push and haunting verisimilitude. As Fielding’s fellow patients, Peter Reeves and Nicholas Harazin don’t just become their dysfunctions, but show the dark and bright colors of their humanity. And Linda Stephens and Laura Gray effectively play characters that are anchors in Fielding’s unstable world.
As Fielding, Mary McDonald Kerr is an affecting presence. In the opening scene, huddled in the back room of a gallery as her latest show of paintings is skewered by the art world, she’s able to project an intimate vulnerability—even in the larger than intimate space of the Cabot Theatre. And she maintains it throughout the play, even as she started channeling troubled baseball star Darryl Strawberry to extend her insurance coverage and her stay at the hospital.
But when Strawberry appears, Gilman’s play starts to tie itself into puzzling knots of motivation and “reality.” Pirandello played the same game, but Gilman’s bobs and weaves happen too quickly. She seems more interested in inducing double takes instead of offering food for thought on the nature of human identity. For all its breezy, comic tone, Sweetest Swing is quite dense with ideas about art, achievement, and human potential. But the questions and dramatic shifts come so fast that it seems Gilman is more interested in getting through a checklist than in a fleshed consideration of human experience. There’s a lot to think about after the play’s final moments and speeches. But because things happen so fast, there isn’t an awful lot to feel about the people we’ve spent the last two hours with.
The real gallery environment around the city wasn’t the pressure cooker of Gilman’s play. There were the usual number of openings and receptions, but some special events as well. Bad Soviet Habits turned the Moct Bar into a hotbed of creative activity with “Motionary Comics." Starting with six huge white panels around the perimeter of the room, the project enlisted a dozen comic artists to create a life-size strip. At various times, small children were wrapped in protective jumpsuits and held to the wall while someone airbrushed their silhouette. Artists set down their beers and magic markered outlines and backgrounds. Eventually, the story of Rumpelstilskin talent for spinning straw into gold became a very local tale of a guy who would make beer out of cheese and wurst. There was lots of video and photographic documentation, but the strip itself will remain on the walls only until Thursday.
On Saturday, when the “Gallery Night & Day” viewing is less frenzied, I toured the Kenilworth East building of UW-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts with Associate Dean Scott Emmons as a part of the school’s semi-annual open house. This wasn’t my first time around the school, but I saw more terrific work than on previous visits—I’m not shy about barging into studios when there’s a Dean at my side. Tim Decker’s Claymation studio was home to future Will Vintons and Nick Parks. The guitar program put together an impressive 16-instrument ensemble to perform Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint.” And several artists opened their studios and workshops. Judging from the crowd throughout the day, the open house is becoming an popular Milwaukee event.
