Cast of ‘Home Games’ Takes Personal Look at Alzheimer’s

“I had a brain concussion and hemorrhage when I was in the Marine Corps at Parris Island,” actor Richie Allan says. “I ran up this hill and I tripped on the foot of the guy next to me, and my helmet fell off and I hit a tree. Knocked me out cold. That was my war injury.”

Allan is talking about the kind of connection an actor makes when tackling a difficult role, as he’s doing playing former baseball player Tony in Tom Ziegler’s “Home Games.” The play, directed by actress Maria O’Brien, had its Los Angeles premiere Friday at the Whitefire Theater in Sherman Oaks. The “home games” refer to the great American pastime, but more specifically to the uneasy games between parents with Alzheimer’s disease and the adult children morally obliged to care for them.

“That has helped me,” adds Allan, referring to his concussion. “A doctor held a fork up, and I remember knowing what that was, but I couldn’t get the word out. I couldn’t find the name for it. It got me very frustrated. It’s a terrible thing.”

The problem is much closer to director O’Brien, whose late father had Alzheimer’s. His last years were impossible for the whole family. No one connected with the production knew her father had the disease, O’Brien says. “The character Tony in the play has had brain damage, an injury, . . . and it’s the same story. The weight, the burden of this problem--this disease has two victims, the person who has it and the person who takes care of them. It’s a caretaker’s plight, and the sense of obligation, and the moral conflict.”

O’Brien’s name is not unfamiliar to Los Angeles theatergoers. Last year in “50/60,” Mark Taper Forum’s retrospective of short plays that helped form modern theater, she appeared in “The Maids” and “The Connection.” Last fall, she was at the Callboard Theatre in a drama about understudies, “Going On.”

Her parents’ names may be even more familiar. The film career of Edmond O’Brien, who won an Academy Award for “The Barefoot Contessa,” spanned several decades. Earlier he appeared as Mercutio in “Romeo and Juliet” with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. O’Brien’s mother is Broadway star Olga San Juan, whose performance in the 1952 hit “Paint Your Wagon” helped make audiences forget the weakness of Alan Jay Lerner’s libretto.

It took a while for the family to understand Edmond O’Brien’s condition. “My father came in and out for several years when we didn’t know he was ill,” she says. “I suffered great guilt about it and so did my brother and sister. We basically said, ‘I don’t want to be around him.’ Like what people did with Rita Hayworth.

“We thought he was drunk; we thought he was just giving up; we thought he’d degenerated somehow and gotten very black in his mind, and negative, and didn’t want to deal. He couldn’t deal. I realize now that he was such a good actor that he lasted a lot longer in the real world than he should have because he faked it.

“You’d be talking to him and he’d say, ‘Say that again.’ And he would cover it. He’d have about five or six sentences he’d use all the time. I finally started getting tuned to that, where I realized he had no idea what you were saying. He knew how to behave and pretend he was hearing you because he was such a good actor.”

O’Brien talks about the character of Tony in the play and how, because of his brain damage, he has locked into a safe period in his past. Tony thinks that he’s still playing ball for the Yankees, still conversing with Casey Stengel (his daughter Myrt, played by Sharon McCreedy) and still joking around with Mickey Mantle (her boyfriend Frank, played by David Elliott).

“My God, this is exactly how my father talked,” O’Brien says, “except my father, for the last several years before he died, got locked into movie dialogue. If he didn’t like what was happening, he’d say, ‘Scene isn’t playing, scene isn’t playing, you’re not in your light.’ Or if he didn’t want to talk anymore, he’d say, ‘Cut, cut! Take a wrap, now.’ He got stuck in a groove, like Tony.

“Tony woke up from a coma. In 1955, when he played on the Yankees, his wife was dying and he knew it, and it was the most watershed year of his life. Tony is locked into a ballplayer’s lingo, in terms of the game and all of that. In my father’s case, the biggest passion of his life was that he was an actor.”

David Elliott agrees. “It seems as though they go back to the most vibrant memory of their lives.”

Richie Allan remembers a vibrant memory of his life that he brings to his performance: “I had a tryout at Yankee Stadium; that’s my claim to fame,” he says. “I didn’t make the team.”

The company, including the director, fortunately retain their sense of humor in dealing with a heartbreaking subject. As in real life, they say, sometimes a sense of humor is all that gets them through.

Because of her experience with her father, Maria O’Brien has a powerful emotional connection with “Home Games.” It’s the same connection that led her to work for several years with the Alzheimer’s Disease Assn. and to make trips to Washington and Sacramento to talk to legislators about improving conditions--and laws--that affect victims.

O’Brien sees a real need for audiences to explore this kind of material in drama. “My own personal feeling about art and the theater and the movies, whatever,” she says, “is that through the experience of seeing a painting or a movie or a play, you walk out a more compassionate person than when you walked in because you realize, ‘Oh, my God, black people couldn’t get on a bus,’ or ‘People with brain damage are like 2-year-old children and need to be supervised.’

“And then the next time you see some guy in a line fumbling for his change, you remember this experience and think, ‘He’s probably got a daughter at home, crying and thinking what is she going to do with dad?’ ”

A smile that glows with her father’s dedication and her mother’s humor flashes across Maria O’Brien’s face as she re-enters the world of the play. “Why is it,” she asks, “that everything in life looks like either Eugene O’Neill or Woody Allen?”

“Home Games” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays at the Whitefire Theater, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks, through June 2. For information and tickets, call (213) 466-1767.