Is there a better place to stage a play about a Major League Baseball player who may be planning to make a political protest during Game 7 of the World Series than an actual baseball stadium?
For director and self-professed baseball fan Jack Reuler, the answer was no when it came to Gabriel Greene and Alex Levy’s Safe at Home, which the University of Houston’s School of Theatre & Dance, with support from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, will open this week at the University’s baseball stadium Schroeder Park.
“I don’t know if they originally intended for it to be done in a baseball stadium or done on a stage where you replicated the nine different locations in the play, but I said, ‘We have to do this in a baseball stadium,’” recalls Reuler.
Greene, then the literary manager at La Jolla Playhouse, brought Safe at Home to the attention of Reuler, the founder of Minneapolis-based Mixed Blood Theatre Company. Reuler took the play back to Minnesota, where he reached out to the St. Paul Saints, a Triple-A minor league team for the Minnesota Twins. He arranged to stage the production in their stadium, which is where Safe at Home made its premiere in 2017.
Reuler says the 90-minute immersive production uses baseball as a metaphor, adding that it’s “really a play about us, immigration policy, about Major League Baseball’s relationship to its players from other countries, our fascination with celebrity.”
The action begins ahead of the seventh game of the World Series, which also happens to be two days before the U.S. presidential election. The Democratic candidate, who recently rolled back her proposed immigration policy, is set to throw out the first pitch, and a journalist suggests that Victor Castillo, the San Diego Padres’ 25-year-old ace from the Dominican Republic, might take the mound and refuse to pitch in protest.
It’s a rumor, Reuler says, that travels around the ballpark fast.
“We hear fans talking about it. We hear vendors talking about it. We hear an umpire and the vice president of Major League Baseball, and then the general manager and a pitching coach,” says Reuler. “We hear all these people say, ‘What does this mean to the game? What does this mean to America? What does this mean to journalism? What does this mean to politics?’”
Each conversation plays out in a different part of Schroeder Park, from the press box to the clubhouse to the dugout. Reuler thinks theater lovers who like seeing theater done in different forms will be attracted to this aspect of the production, as will baseball aficionados, who will get to experience parts of a baseball stadium – “the inner sanctums of the baseball stadium,” Reuler calls them – that they normally would not have access to.
“Even if they’re season ticket holders to a baseball team, they’re going to go to places in a stadium they’ve never been to before,” adds Reuler.
Actors in each location will repeat their scenes five to ten times each night as the audience cycles by them in groups of 20, with each group led by a tour guide.
“The tour guide takes you from space to space and gives you context on the scene you just saw. So, that’s where they do some baseball education. They do some political education. They make sure you know why that scene was where it was and what it means in a broader context – and they do that all in less than 30 seconds,” explains Reuler.
Each scene is exactly seven minutes to the second, after which the audience has three minutes to get to the next scene, and the actors have three minutes to recover.
“It is a real test of an actor’s stamina and focus,” says Reuler.
Not only are the scenes carefully timed, Reuler says they are intimate, with the audience “listening in on conversations” from “inches away” in seven of the nine scenes, while in the other two, “the actors treat them as the press corps or other vendors.” In all the scenes, however, Reuler advises to listen closely.
“Something you hear in scene two will echo in scene seven, or something you hear in scene one will have a little minutia that you’ll hear again an hour later,” says Reuler. “The play has a whodunit, thriller nature to it, and so each scene – there’s nine scenes, of course, because it’s baseball – each scene ends with a cliffhanger and propels you to want to see the next scene to see how these scenes all add up to tell one fascinating story.”
Though audiences will hear a lot about Victor from scene to scene, it’s not until the play’s final scene that he appears, and viewers can finally “get inside the head of this pitcher we’ve heard so much about.”
“He’s a hot head,” says Reuler. “He’s thrown water coolers on the field to protest an umpire’s call. And so, we get the idea that this guy, while a phenomenal pitcher, also is a bit of a clubhouse problem who doesn’t play the way everybody wants him to play.”
Victor’s impending free agency (i.e., the opportunity to negotiate a new contract with any team for any amount of money) raises the stakes even higher. “He has to ask himself, ‘Does protesting this immigration policy for a very personal reason, is that more important than me getting $400 million-dollar contract offers?’”
Throughout the show, “Does the good of the many supersede the good of me?” is a question that plays out “over and over again.”
“You should wonder each time you leave a scene, ‘What did he do? What did she do?’” says Reuler. “‘Did this person do that, or didn’t they do that? Did this person take care of themselves or the bigger picture?’”
Safe at Home will open two days after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and Reuler says that the production will “have to mirror history, rather than history mirror us” – assuming, of course, that there’s a clear-cut winner.
“Will we know on the day of the election how the election turns out? If we don’t, then it actually becomes even more poignant. Quite honestly, if the election on Tuesday isn’t known until after the following Sunday, then this play is more heightened than ever. And if we know Tuesday night, the playwrights are ready to make some little tweaks,” says Reuler.
Regardless of the results, the play will leave audiences with a lot of food for thought, with Reuler saying, “Hopefully, the best part of the show will be the arguments that happen on the way home.”
Performances of Safe at Home are scheduled for 7 p.m. November 7-10 at the University of Houston’s Schroeder Park, 3100 Cullen Blvd. For more information, call 713-743-3388 or visit uh.edu/kgmca/theatre-and-dance. $15-$20.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
