Word: balme
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Cubs Manager Jim Frey, a minor-league batting champion of 1957, used to soak his bats in motor oil, an appropriate balm for one whose travels led him practically everywhere but to the major leagues. While awaiting promotion with the St. Louis Cardinals, though, Frey once drew near enough to Stan Musial to hear a definition of a doubleheader that stayed with him. "That's when Stanley can get ten hits in one day!" Musial exclaimed. "Think of it, ten hits!" On such optimum expectations, all Cubdom is founded, even in the after-math of three season-ending losses...
...BALM IN GILEAD by Lanford Wilson...
Energy−atomic, unharnessed, virulent−abounds in Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company revival of Balm in Gilead, the Lanford Wilson dope opera that was first produced in 1965. The set may depict a grungy, all-night coffee shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, but it soon takes on the sulfurous glow of the lower depths: a rush-hour subway car, say, some time during World War III. Junkies, hookers, drag queens, derelicts, ganefs and hit men rub up against Joe (Danton Stone) and Darlene (Laurie Metcalf), a couple too amiable or dense to survive the Nighttown...
...Sinise is one of the founders of Steppenwolf, an admirable community of switch-hitting theater folk in business for a decade and lately receiving wider acclaim for their Manhattan transfers of Sam Shepard's True West and C.P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang ... The director of Balm in Gilead is John Malkovich, who now seems on the springboard to stardom with his roles in Broadway's Death of a Salesman and the film Places in the Heart. In his liberal adaptation of Wilson's text, Malkovich has shown some up-front ingenuity: spotlighting or freeze...
...actor can both inhabit his character and stand outside it, flashing signals to the audience that say, "I'm not really this lowlife, but it's fun to pretend." Perhaps that is why the audience at off-Broadway's spacious new Minetta Lane Theater, where Balm moved last week after a successful run at the Circle Rep, looks to be enjoying the play a bit too much for its own good. They are sharing not a drink of human dregs but a celebration of show biz in all its volcanic, specious theatricality. Such are the seductions...