The TV and stage director explains how casting, baseball camp and fight choreography helped the Second Stage Theater production step up to the plate for a Tony-winning story about American identity and the country's favorite pastime.
Between the cheering crowds, the performance anxiety and a daily schedule, sport is theater and theater is sport for those onstage and off. “I can watch TV or film and watch it 100 times, and it’s going to be the same thing. I can’t do anything to affect the proceedings. In the theater and this stadium, everybody has the potential to affect the outcome in real-time.
As Darren’s new business manager Mason Marzac and the Empires — an amalgamation of Japanese, Dominican and white baseballers played by Julian Cihi, Hiram Delgado, Eduardo Ramos, Tyler Lansing Weaks, Carl Lundstedt and Ken Marks’ skipper — grapple with how his “coming out” has changed his image and their relationship to it, he fights to maintain a sense of normalcy in his public and private life while proving that the only thing that’s changed since his public admission is them.
But the week before the production team began to construct elements of the Empires’ universe, Ellis put his cast into a week of baseball training. “In the afternoon when they came back, we would sit around and talk about the play around a table,” he says. “I put them all in baseball camp because there had to be a language and understanding of the game. All of them had to find out and learn about baseball at whatever level they wanted to do to support the characters.
Williams also knows baseball intimately, playing on travel teams with his brother through high school, the game, he says, a “connective tissue between me and my father.” This, among other experiences, allows him to speak to his character’s experiences with familiarity.
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