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Main character batty in ABET’s ‘Home Games’

THE BEACHES LEADER | March 12, 2010
By JOHNNY WOODHOUSE, Associate Editor
Note: Article appeared in print edition only

Tom Ziegler grew up a few miles from Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs since 1916. As a kid, he often accompanied his grandfather to baseball games at the historic ball park, known for its hand-turned scoreboard and its ivy-covered outfield walls.

“I’ve always been passionate about baseball,” Ziegler said this week in a phone interview.

“My grandpa had box seats near the Cubs dugout. I remember paying 75 cents for bleacher seats in the 1940s and ’50s.”

A retired theater professor now living in the Virgin Islands, Ziegler is currently working on a screenplay about baseball based on his 1985 play, “Home Games.”

The romantic comedy about a single woman, Mertle Mae Tucker, caring for her batty father, Tony, a former reserve catcher for the New York Yankees, opens today at the Atlantic Beach Experimental Theatre, 716 Ocean Blvd. Tickets are $15 and $12 for seniors, students and military.

Ziegler first staged “Home Games” at Washington & Lee University, where he taught theater for 33 years. The fictional play made its off-Broadway debut in October 1989 at the now-defunct Hudson Guild Theater. Ziegler wrote the script while working on another play in New York.

“It started out with just two characters,” said Ziegler, whose plays “The Ninth Step” and “The Last Resort” also premiered in New York.

“Tony emerged as the whole focus of the play. He speaks in baseball terms and thinks Myrt is Casey Stengel. He never got to play for the Yankees [during the World Series] but he would chat up the fans before each game.”

Tony, who seems to be suffering from Alzheimer’s, is locked in a time warp. He still thinks it’s 1955, the year NBC aired baseball games in color and the year the Dodgers broke the Yanks’ World Series win streak. Myrt leads a lonely existence as a truck dispatcher living in a cluttered apartment in Washington Heights with only a canary, a blind cat and her father’s bizarre ramblings to keep her company. To better her station in life, Myrt enrolls in night school, where she meets a young executive named Frank. As the romance grows, Myrt has to decide whether or not to put Tony in a nursing home.

Billed as a “screwball comedy about the curveballs of love,” the play rests on the shoulders of ABET regular Bob Shellenberger, who plays the demented ex-ballplayer on the verge of being “traded” to a Cleveland old-folks home. ABET has spruced up the script a bit by adding younger actors Lisa LaGrande and Matt Shuman as Myrt and Frank. Directed by Rebecca Williams, the opening of “Home Games” coincides with the annual rites of spring training in Florida.

“Tony is a screwball character and Myrt has to speak his language to communicate with him,” said Ziegler, best know for his award-winning play “Grace & Gloria,” which was made into a 1998 Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Gena Rowlands and Diane Lane.

“It’s a single set and all the action takes place in Myrt’s apartment. My wife, Shirley, played Myrt the first time we staged it at Washington & Lee. The university allowed me a lot of time to write while I was there.”

Ziegler retired from teaching two years ago and moved to St Croix, where his latest play, “Sundays at Eleven,” opened last year at the Caribbean Community Theatre. Besides “Subway Series,” which recently won a national screenwriting contest, Ziegler is writing an adapted screenplay for an independent film directed by his youngest son, Tony, a senior at the University of North Carolina. One of his latter plays, “Mrs. Kemble’s Tempest,” about a 19th-century British actress, is being staged this month at the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival.

“Home Games” runs at 8 p.m. today and Saturday and March 19, 20, 25, 26 and 27, and 2 p.m. March 21. For reservations, call 249-7177, or visit abettheatre.com