Steroids and Babe Ruth? Rutgers playwright takes a light-hearted look at one of baseball's darker subjects
Fans of baseball know that Babe Ruth’s home-run-hitting prowess was once credited to his bingeing on piles of hot dogs and pitchers of root beer. But how would the Babe handle baseball’s recent power play with steroids?
Playwright Alex Gherardi, an MFA student at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts, explores the notion in a new play Big League Chew, which takes a light-handed look at one of the sport’s darker subjects. The play was chosen for a baseball-themed stage festival performed on June 17, 18, and 19 at the Mile Square Theatre in Hoboken.
Gherardi’s work has drawn the attention of Major League Baseball TV, which is scheduled to broadcast a profile of the playwright for its series This Week in Baseball on June 25 at 3:30 p.m. on the FOX network. Fame hasn’t been unkind, and “it’s been interesting to have a camera crew following me down College Avenue,” in New Brunswick, said Gherardi, who is also an actor. “People do notice you.”
Chris O’Connor, artistic director of Mile Square Theatre and a member of the directing faculty at Mason Gross, said that baseball-themed drama “has a universality, an attraction.” And as Hoboken lays claim to being the birthplace of baseball, what better venue? The festival is now in its ninth year, and draws from professionals and student-actors, some from Rutgers, to put on the plays.
For Gherardi, 23, the one-act play will be his first professional production and the highlight of his initial year in the school’s graduate playwriting program. The scene is set in a minor-league locker room. Two players discuss their ambitions and the apparent price of reaching the majors. As one player confesses to using performance-enhancing (and highly illegal) steroids, an apparition appears. A husky apparition in an old-fashioned uniform. The Sultan of Swat, the Bambino, Babe Ruth?
“Yes, the ghost of the Babe,” said Gherardi, who grew up playing ball and “infatuated” with Ruth as a celebrity and eminence of the game. “Someone to tell them how to find a child-like love . . . someone to tell them that, no matter what you do in life, it’s important to find the pure joy.”
Big League Chew is being directed by another Rutgers theater student, Melissa Firlit, an MFA candidate in directing at Mason Gross. It will be one of seven short plays performed during the “7th Inning Stretch” festival in the Hoboken theater’s 120-seat space. Tickets are $15 for students and seniors, and $25 for general admission.
Gherardi graduated from Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York, where he studied theater, before considering graduate programs and finding Rutgers.
“In college,” he said, “I was the kind of student who declared every major at least once. Then I wrote a play in my senior year. I cast my friends, we performed it, and it was the most rewarding experience I’ve ever had.”
He’s about to do the same thing on a grander stage. As executive director of the Central New York Shakespeare Festival, Inc., Gherardi is working this summer to stage an adaptation of Henry V, in which the Bard’s usually plentiful cast is reduced to only seven players.
The production is scheduled for August 12, 13, 19, and 20 at the Catherine Cummings Theater on the campus of Cazenovia College in Cazenovia, New York. The theater is about 75 miles southeast of Syracuse.
In the spirit of summer theater, Gherardi is also trying out a new model to attract audiences: Pay as you go. Instead of charging a set ticket price up front, he’s asking audiences to pay after the performance, at a price each individual decides.
It’s a risky idea that might prove dangerous on Broadway, but one that may just work out. “We’re doing this for the honor of it, for the art,” Gherardi explained.
With two years left in his three-year playwriting program at Mason Gross, Gherardi is well on his way toward discovering his own “pure joy.”