Chip Fuller (played by Woody Harper, left) and Dan Drake (David Kudler) whoop it up as sports radio talk show hosts. Photo by Robin Jackson.
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
A new play with an enigmatic title, Value Over Replacement, features sometimes confusing flashback and dream sequences. But it’s the specter of famed but un-hall of famer Barry Bonds, star homer hitter and alleged steroid user, that hovers over everything.
The dramedy by San Rafael resident Ruben Grijalva is a morality play that makes sure to sprinkle in enough laugh-guaranteeing lines to lighten the heaviness.
Many questions are posed but answers never become available — even by pondering long after the seven-member cast has taken its collective bows.
That said, Oscar “Woody” Harper is superlative as Ed “Chip” Fuller, a Triple-A minor leaguer who’s convinced he can still permanently make it to The Show, the major leagues, despite being short on talent, comparatively long in the tooth, and the long-time bearer of a bad knee.
Harper’s face projects a gamut of emotions as Chip goes through a series of introspections and causes a publicity surge by belatedly copping to injecting himself with Human Growth Hormone and other illegal substances.
The playwright — comments director Ken Sonkin in the program guide — “maps…one man’s tortured pursuit of a boyhood dream. [The play] doesn’t ask that you exonerate him, only that you hear him out.”
Sonkin’s encapsulation, not incidentally, links to Chip asking, “How many years would you be willing to trade to be exactly what you wanted to be when you were ten years old?”
David Kudler believably portrays Chronicle writer Dan Drake, Chip’s nemesis/friend/radio sports talk co-host on fictional San Francisco station KSFP, who cunningly prods him into a high-ratings moment — a confession.
By being onstage, Kudler, an Equity performer, ends a self-imposed theatrical absence of 19 years. And makes the audience hope the gap is forever closed.
Erik Forst, sitting in the bleachers, contemplates being a seasoned ballplayer. Photo by Robin Jackson.
Schoolgirl Amelia Stafford artfully switches genders as Alex, the Fuller’s son, especially agonized in a scene where he’s abused by his baseball-obsessed dad, and schoolboy Erik Forst is wordless but potent in dual bit parts as a young fan and young Chip.
Rachel Ka’iulani Kennealy (as Chip’s wife), Jennifer Reimer (as the mother of a boy who committed suicide after taking steroids), and David Schiller (as Jack Fuller, Chip’s late father, and as Mike Clawson, Chip’s drug supplier) fill out the cast. Effectively, all.
Value Over Replacement, a Ross Valley Players community theater production that’s part of its annual RVP New Works series, doesn’t depend on a deep knowledge of baseball to enjoy it — it’s a play about people, after all, not the math of statistics — but it might help if a theatergoer comes in knowing something about Bonds, the archetype for the never-seen character, Ken Hobbes.
Chip, meanwhile, is in effect a stand-in for all 27 players that allegedly received performance-enhancing drugs from the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO).
The wonderfully familiar crack of a bat hitting a baseball is skillfully provided by sound designer Bruce Vieira, who never misses a beat when Chip’s father endlessly practices with his son.
Benicia Martinez merits praise for the striking, spare set that includes bleachers and a corner that serves as a fill-in-the-blank area ranging from a spot where the autistic Alex incessantly practices slamming a ball against a wall to a spot where multiple characters testify before Congress.
The title, usually shortened in real-life to VORP, stems from an obscure sports stat that supposedly can evaluate a player’s contribution when compared with a real or imagined player of the same level and position. There’s but one reference in two acts and two hours to the statistic, though, so a new title could be more informative to a potential theatergoer.
Grijalva has written a first act that drags with excessive exposition and choppiness and a second that sprints and is sprightly, a first that borders on boring and a second that’s jammed with enough emotion to fill two acts. A bald senior in the first row could be heard at the end of an opening weekend matinee suggesting, correctly, that a sharp editor might cut it down to a more compelling one-act show.
Chip Fuller (Woody Harper) consoles his wife, Emily (Rachel Ka’iulani Kennealy). Photo by Robin Jackson.
The playwright nevertheless needs to be lauded for inserting lots of Bay Area references and such thought-provoking lines as, “If heart were a thing, there would be a stat for it already” and the Death of a Salesman-like “Steroids never killed anybody — disappointment, that’s the thing that kills everybody.”
He deserves kudos, too for a lengthy, uproarious, lowbrow segment on farting, almost as funny as Mel Brooks’ notorious cinematic scene in Blazing Saddles.
Grijalva has written that his “theatrical worlds are full of abstract hopes colliding with concrete frailties. The resulting debris can be beautiful, grotesque, and often — thank God — hilarious.”
That, indeed, does sum up the best of Value Over Replacement.
Stylishly.
Value Over Replacement, part of the Ross Valley Players RVP New Works, will run at the Barn Theater at the Ross Art and Garden Center, 30 Sir Francis Drake Blvd., Ross, through April 12. Tickets: $30 to $45. Info: 415-456-9555 or www.rossvalleyplayers.com.
Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.
