Theater: The Boys of 67 Summers Ago Out!

In life’s endless informal competition for the most misguided venture, try this combination: a first-time playwright; a cast of relative unknowns; a depressing and largely forgotten incident of history; and a director born in France and trained in Britain making his U.S. debut with a show about that quintessentially American subject, baseball. The result would seem foreordained to be disaster. But Out!, the story of eight Chicago White Sox players who deliberately lost the 1919 World Series for a few thousand dollars a man, is instead an off-Broadway joy. Poignant, intelligent, funny and morally alert, it shows what the theater can do far better than TV or movies in dealing with historical material: bring characters alive by letting them explain their dilemmas directly to the audience.

The “Black Sox,” as they came to be known, were hounded out of organized baseball and into the oblivion that the team owners believed they deserved. Even “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, a lifetime .356 hitter whom his contemporaries compared with Ty Cobb, is recalled today chiefly for the plea addressed to him by a disbelieving boy: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” The conditions that impelled him and his teammates to take money from gamblers — low pay, lack of security and a general feeling of involuntary servitude — have long since been overturned. Free agency, binding arbitration and other Big Business behavior may have cost baseball its aura of boyishness, but these changes have also enriched players enough to insulate them.

If Out! cannot serve as a cautionary tale about today’s athletes, Playwright Lawrence Kelly’s vision is at least a compelling metaphor for the way decent people in all walks of life slip into dishonesty. Kelly’s perception is that the Black Sox did not cheat as individuals. They did so, following the basic tenet of their sport, as a team. Money may have been the bait but loyalty and comradeship were the motives that persuaded them, some with great reluctance, to betray their talents. As Chick Gandil (Paul Christie), the sour ringleader of the scam, remarks in an aside, people become willing to do something they consider wrong if they see enough others doing it. Kelly shrewdly narrows his focus to just the wrongdoers, not the colleagues who never joined — or, in at least some cases, were not asked. Most of the locker-room dialogue is persuasive, blending easy badinage with underlying detachment. By far the most effective scenes are the verbal dances in which the players stumble into conspiracy, each looking to the other for guidance.

Director Max Charruyer, Set Designer John-Michael Deegan and Lighting Designer John Conway have skillfully interwoven the dramatized and quasi- documentary scenes and monologues for each character. Kelly’s best help, however, comes from a superb ensemble cast, especially Christie, Michael Countryman as Jackson, Arnie Mazer as the loutish Swede Risberg and John A. O’Hern as the quietly sodden Fred McMullin. The roles could easily resemble the agglomeration familiar from war movies: a doomed innocent, a hot-tempered sidekick, a misfit willing to do anything to fit in. But they enact their stories so convincingly that one cannot help caring about what happened to these boys of summer some 67 summers ago.