The Raj of Ry

For his latest play, The Raj of St. Louis, Ry Kincaid has chosen baseball as his subject (something much more divisive, in the theatrical world, than gayness). In particular, he’s after the 1920s Cardinals, examining star hitter and sumbitch Rogers Hornsby (the commanding Chris Nielsen) and manager Branch Rickey (Matt Rapport). The centerpiece of this drama is Rickey’s scheme to turn minor-league ball clubs into baseball’s first farm system.

Kincaid’s two leads embody numerous interesting conflicts. We get the stats-and-numbers man (Rickey) versus the feel-it-in-the-gut hitter; the gentleman businessman versus a free agent who knows he’s “a product.” Best of all, we get the language of the Bible versus that of the gutter. Kincaid blesses Rickey with a warm monologue about churchin’, and Hornsby complains of Rickey, “We might as well be coached by a shitfaced armadillo.” (He also suggests a spitball pitcher slather the ball in “jack-off.”) The show climaxes with a World Series win that my grandfather used to tell me about.

It’s sweet, but Kincaid has some work to do. Raj is too short and too quick, more rooted in headlines than in these men, and we never get any clear sense of the dangers — or success — of Rickey’s farm-system scheme. Kincaid takes the inherent grandness of baseball as a given, never mining it for anything more universal. The show’s just an hour, so there’s plenty of room to work in what’s missing. What’s here is like a promising rookie — one I’d be happy to see again someday, bulked up, less green and thoroughly disillusioned.