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Introduction
For over two decades, Fred Newman has been a unique voice in the American theatre.
In 30 highly original and entertaining plays and musicals, Newman’s plays
are deeply philosophical and accessible, sharply political and non-didactic. Read
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Links
• allstars.org |
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For
fan, play's the thing
New work cheers 1961 Bx. baseball – and
mom
Jose Martinez
Daily News
February 25, 2001
The summer of 1961 was the best kind of baseball season for a Yankees fan.
The Bronx Bombers were on their way to another World Series title, and their
two
slugging outfielders — Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris — were in a
to-the wire race for a home run record that had stood for 34 years.
But the team’s next-door neighbor in the Bronx, loyal fan Sadie Newman,
wasn’t around the old Jewish neighborhood anymore.
“Mom died in 1959,” said her son, Fred Newman, a Bronx-born playwright
and psychotherapist. “She just missed this great season by a couple of
years.”
More than four decades later, Newman is commemorating his poker-playing mother
by inserting her into his new play, “Mantle, Maris and Mom.”
The Off-Off Broadway musical, which debuted last week at the Castillo Theatre
in the West Village, is set in 1961 in the Gerard Ave. tenement where he and
his mother lived, just a block from Yankee Stadium. It runs through April 8.
“I wanted to give her this little gift,” said Newman, the artistic
director of the Castillo Theatre. “I wanted to do a play about her.”
She’s the inspiration for “Grandma Sadie,” an ailing eccentric
who spends her days with Esther, the neighborhood gossip, and Harry, the local
bookie. A block from Yankee Stadium, they track the race to 60 home runs between
Mantle and Maris through the roar of the crowd pouring into their homes.
As Sadie’s health worsens, she also befriends Mantle, one of the ballplayers
who
lived in the neighborhood during the baseball season. Her neighbors cry foul.
Soon, Sadie is no longer just fixing up pots of matzo ball soup for her favorite
Yankee.
In a fantastic twist, she ends up going out on the town to the Copacabana nightclub
with Mantle.
“It’s not a newsreel; it’s not the way things really were,” said
author Roger Kahn, who saw the play last week. “It’s his fantasy.”
But that’s the charm of the play, said Kahn, who wrote “The Boys
of Summer” and has covered baseball over five decades. It steers clear
of Mantle’s notorious drinking and skirt-chasing to pair him with a dying
grandmother.
“
I never heard Mantle talk much about Bronx neighborhoods,” Kahn said. “He
was
more into downtown and showgirls.”
The unorthodox twosome of Sadie, a Polish Jew, and Mantle, a country boy ballplayer
from Oklahoma, sends the message that different cultures can’t ignore each
other, Newman said.
“Right down the block, there was this whole other world,” said Newman,
who is Jewish. “And yet, the community was still pretty narrow-minded.”
Newman, 64, grew up in the tenements around Yankee Stadium and lived in the Bronx
until the late 1950s, when he left to join the Army. As a young man, he sold
programs outside Yankee Stadium, and sometimes charged fans admission to the
rooftop of his building at 158th St. and Gerard Ave. from where they could watch
games.
“You could see right inside the stadium,” he said.
Newman also got to see the players up close, because many lived in buildings
along
the Grand Concourse. He remembers seeing Mantle on occasion, and delivering groceries
to the home of Yankee Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra.
“The players walked down the street, their wives shopped in the neighborhood,” Newman
said. “You wouldn’t see them do that
now.”
“Mantle, Maris and Mom” isn’t Newman’s first play about
baseball. He’s also directed “Stealin’ Home” and “Satchel:
ARequiem for Racism,” plays about the pioneering black ballplayers, Jackie
Robinson and Satchel Paige.
But Newman has gained much of his notoriety for repeatedly tangling with the
Anti-Defamation
League and serving as the political guru to controversial activist Lenora Fulani.
He has penned works such as 1999’s “The Last Temptation of William
Jefferson,” a satire based on the scandals of the Clinton presidency.
Newman said he’s happy to get back to baseball with his latest work, while
remembering
his mother and her favorite team.
“I love baseball,” Newman said. “And my mother — she
was passionate about baseball.”
Performances will be held Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., and at 2 p.m.
on Saturday and Sunday. For information, call (212) 941-5800.
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