Fall is here, so it must be theater season! As readers know, Mer and I have season tickets to Actors Summit Theater (we had the good fortune of buying the season tickets just before we decided to buy our new house, so the theater season could still be funded). Last Saturday evening, Mer and I got dressed up (hey, this IS our social life for now!) and went to see Richard Dresser’s Rounding Third, a comedy about Little League baseball. Richard Dresser wrote the play after having his son tell him that the son’s coach had devised a strategy where slower base runners would get “hurt” and fake an injury so that faster runners could be on base. It got a little more complicated in that Dresser coached for awhile as well and found himself wanting to win at all costs. So, he wrote a very funny play about it – a coach who wants to win no matter what, and a new assistant coach that wants the kids to “just have fun.”

The interaction worked really well. Yes, both coaches were stereotypes to a large degree, but they worked. Seeing the must-win coach seething pretty much every time the have-fun coach spoke was really funny. Oddly, both Meredith and I found ourselves more on the side of the must-win coach, which is funny, because we both thought at the start of the play that we would like the have-fun coach.

The play was not terribly deep, but it was very entertaining, and it did make you think about where on the win/fun scale people should be. It is only a two-man play, and the actors pulled it off very well. My only slight complaint was that the must-win coach used an awful lot of strong language, which was probably part of the character, but it was so frequent I wished it had been scaled back some – I think the idea could have been communicated with the same punch through body language. Still, on the whole, it was a fun evening.