items tagged with Lee Blessing

Before praising the Green Room's lovely, charming production of Eleemosynary - the Lee Blessing comedy/drama that ran February 22 through 24 - I feel compelled to also praise the show's Friday-night audience. Actually, I feel compelled to praise the audiences at each of the productions I've attended in this Rock Island space; for fellow theatre devotees who tend to grow hostile near patrons who routinely cough, shift in their seats, slowly open cellophane-wrapped candies, and forget to turn off their cell phones, the Green Room is easily the area's venue of choice.

St. Ambrose University's Fortinbras was the most thoroughly entertaining theatrical production I've yet seen in 2007. And while, if you missed the show during its one-weekend, three-performance run, I have no interest in rubbing your noses in that fact, I feel the need to write about the experience because I hope that soon (a) you see Fortinbras and (b) you see this production's actors.

Lee Blessing's The Winning Streak, currently at Davenport's Nighswander Theatre, is one of those shows that could easily read better than it plays.

This two-man comedy-drama concerns an estranged father and son who tentatively bond during the late-season rally of a struggling Midwestern baseball team; over the course of seven scenes, Omar (Pat Flaherty) and Ry (Jason Platt) squabble, reach an impasse, and begin squabbling again.

In Lee Blessing's The Winning Streak, the locale is left unspecified; the only information the Tony Award-nominated playwright gives us is that the events transpire in "a city in the Midwest." But audiences can be forgiven for thinking there's nothing unspecified about it.

One of the play's seven scenes takes place "at the end of a dock." Another occurs at a sidewalk café within walking distance of a cathedral and an art museum. And, most tellingly, one takes place "in the stands of a major league stadium," where - to the delight of the show's protagonist - an eternally struggling baseball team is finally enjoying an unprecedented hot streak.

Could this, in fact, be Chicago, and could the beleaguered ballplayers be the Cubs?