BWW Reviews: Group rep Is On a WINNING STREAK

The Winning Streak/by Lee Blessing/directed by Sherry Netherland/Group rep/through August 30

As a companion piece to Eric Simonson's Lombardi on the main stage, Group rep presents Lee Blessing's The Winning Streak on their second stage. Both plays involve sports: Lombardi, football and The Winning Streak, baseball. For full enjoyment of Lombardi, it helps to be a football fan; for The Winning Streak, you need not care at all about baseball. Whereas Lombardi derives its spark from the spirit of the sport, Streak's comes totally from the human spirit. Blessing's brilliance as a writer is in his ability to show human conflict full-out, and there is no finer example of a dysfunctional father/son relationship than this play.

Ryland (Daniel Sykes) comes looking for his father. His mother has narrowed it down to two possibilities, one of whom is Omar Carlyle (Lloyd Pedersen), a retired umpire, who had a one-night stand with her years previous. When the play opens, Ryland tries to talk with Omar in a local bar, as Omar watches a baseball game on widescreen TV. Omar is so wrapped up in the game, that he barely talks. When Ryland shows him a picture or two of his mother, Omar does not look. After a bumpy start, Omar finally talks about the night of seduction and it is obvious that he is mosty likely the father. When Omar's team wins the game - this the first in a series of playoffs - he is convinced that it's a lucky streak due to Ryland's presence. He therefore encourages him to stay to the end of the playoffs, out of purely selfish motivations. Ryland, an art restorer, takes time off from his job in the city and leaves his supposed wife and son behind, to spend time with his father. Omar claims not to want the attention, the 'getting.to.know.you' interplay, but he collapses at one point and is forced to confide that he is suffering with lupus. Ryland has a secret or two as well about his work and his family which eventually emerge, but not without many obstacles.

The attraction of the play is first and foremost in Blessing's fine dialogue laced with tremendous humor. What is a sad, unfulfilling coming together is at all costs terribly funny. Ryland hates baseball and is forced to sit shivering in the rain as he watches a game, merely to please his father. And Omar relishes every second, even the downpour. "Mud is what baseball's about!" When Ryland mentions having to leave, to return home to his job, Omar comments "What emergency could there be in art?" The two men are at constant odds, and we laugh and cry right along with them.

Under the late Sherry Netherland's fine pacing and tight staging (first performed in workshop two years ago before her untimely death). the two actors deliver utterly engaging performances. Pedersen and Sykes are both at home with high drama and dig deep to find every color, every shade, every nuance to express the angst, bitterness and sheer hopelessness of living. Bravo!

No more spoiler alerts here! Go and see The Winning Streak; you'll savor every moment!

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