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Nine baseball-powered short plays.

Saturday May 05, 2001.     By Jennifer Allen

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Famous Door Theatre

6-3, home team.

Despite an unusual fixation on the Mets and the Yankees, Famous Door's collection of nine baseball-powered short plays, "Hitting for the Cycle" (a reprisal of their 1995 run), has a winning percentage of .666 -- not as good as the Baltimore Orioles this year, but pretty darn nice. Innings 1, 8 and 9 proved the pivotal performances, with only 2 and 3 hurting the overall team effort.

The players, John Dunleavy, Thomas Gebbia, Cheryl Graeff, Alexandra Krasnonosova (or alternately Greta Sidwell Honold), Larry Neumann Jr., Dale Rivera, Ted Schneider, James Vaughn and Troy West, determinedly add a flippancy to their parts which capture the flavor of a ball game. Vaughn, Rivera and Neumann particularly invigorate their roles with the sauciness of well-loved players. The occasionally flagging scripts create an obstacle for the actors, yet they manage to transcend some of the worst writing (with the exceptions of Arthur Kopit's "Elegy for the House that Ruth Built," and Heather McDonald's "Rain and Darkness").

Wendy MacLeod1s "Division III," Y. York's "The Bottom of the Ninth" and especially Eric Overmyer's "The Dalai Lama Goes Three for Four" springboard the acting team1s best moments with their uplifting and often inspired scripts. They manage to build their plays around baseball without falling into the hokey and cliché themes and lines which often haunt such motifs. Whenever their scripts touch on the clichés like "Life is like baseball," they add enough humor and self-deprecating fun to undermine the hackles and boredom such overused themes raise.

Most of all, these nine short plays reminded me how much baseball still is part of American culture. Yeah, football and basketball may be gaining fans faster, but baseball has become entwined with they way we think, speak and eat. "Three strikes and you1re out," "rain check," the Baby Ruth candy bar, and dozens of other expressions litter our language and culture. Wilt Chamberlain may be a basketball god, but does his fame in any way compare to that of Babe Ruth?

Certainly you should carry some baggage to this series. A working knowledge of baseball jargon, the lyrics of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" to sing during the seventh-inning stretch, the "Star Spangled Banner" (of course), and a general idea of how a game is played will help you catch the nuances of the jokes and plot, though the overarching ideas can be understood without the fundamentals. And if you know the history and the recent running jokes in the sport, so much the better..

And, yes, you can get yourself Cracker Jacks, a dog and a beer at the park.