‘The Winning Streak’

George Street Playhouse stages the world premiere of Lee Blessing’s father-son drama.

By: Stuart Duncan

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TIMEOFF PHOTOS/MARK CZAJKOWSKI

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   Playwright Lee Blessing certainly fits the definition of prolific. A Walk in the Woods, which played last season at New Brunswick’s George Street Playhouse, has moved on to Broadway, London’s West End and, in the process, been nominated for Tony and Olivier awards and the Pulitzer Prize. Whores just opened in Philadelphia and will play next month at Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey. In all, Blessing has written 30 plays and screenplays, while at the same time heading up the Graduate Playwriting Program at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers.
   His very latest work, The Winning Streak, is having its world premiere at George Street. It has Blessing’s crisp dialogue — which can range from hysterically funny to genuinely moving, with many stops in between — and the playwright’s uncanny sense of character laid out, warts and beauty marks untouched.
   His subject matter this time is baseball — not a glimpse of a team, nor even members of that team, but rather a reunion between a father, a retired major league umpire, and his long-estranged son who knows little of the game and has no real intention of learning. Just as the son contacts his dad, the last place team his father admires goes on a winning streak; the dad believes his son is the magic and the possibility begins to bridge the serious gap that has divided them.
   Two-character plays are tricky; they come with their own peculiar set of rules and pitfalls. In A Walk in the Woods, for example, we had a pair of nuclear negotiators, one American, the other Soviet. The contrasts between them, plus the seriousness of the subject matter and their missions, made for an extraordinary evening. Here, however, there is no sense of real mission — too much is unknown between father and son. Further, both lie extensively, so that we come to realize we are dealing with a pair of losers. Blessing writes dialogue that sounds like poetry: "She’s talk, he’s drink. Before they knew it, the night had wandered off somewhere." But even at the end of the one-act (90-minute) exercise, we know little more about either father or son than we did in the first exhilarating 15 minutes when the verbal swordplay was superior.
   Dan Lauria, well known to regional theater audiences as well as to TV viewers (he played the dad on The Wonder Years) plays the father. He massages the role as the aging curmudgeon with great tenderness, conveying a deep loneliness. Brennan Brown, as the son, has the more thankless job and has to work hard just to overcome the shallowness in the part. The play is episodic and director Lucie Tiberghien has suggested a sense of homelessness in her inventive staging. Since the father spent much time on the road and the son is living a lie, it works nicely.
The Winning Streak continues at George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, through Jan. 30. Performances: Tues.-Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. 2, 8 p.m. (no 2 p.m. performance Jan. 15), Sun. 2, 7 p.m. Tickets cost $28-$56. For information, call (732) 246-7717. On the Web: www.gsponline.org