Playwright Goes Deep This Time

As soon as I heard that actors Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz would be reading a new work by a young playwright, I hustled over to the Canon theater in Beverly Hills, prepared to laugh them off.

I was not disappointed, although Franz had to beg off, too busy shooting a new “NYPD Blue” episode.

Up on stage sat Mantegna, playing a former Chicago Cub third baseman at a “fantasy camp”--a thinly disguised Ron Santo. He was face to face again with his old first baseman, a guy in an incredibly terrible wig.

“You know who the first baseman was, don’t you?” the playwright would ask me later.

“No, who?”

“Joe Pepitone.”

Ah, of course. Now I remember Pepi, strutting around in that ugly rug that looked like Ralph Kramden’s lodge hat. I remember a number of ballplayers--Pepitone, Sal Bando, Steve Ontiveros--who would model wigs from a company called Hairline Creations, even on the field.

Also in the play, a catcher keeps bumming cigarettes off Mantegna’s third baseman, who complains about the guy being too cheap to buy his own. But the minute Mantegna runs out of smokes, his pal pulls out a fresh pack.

“Who’s the mooch?” I ask the playwright.

“Glenn Beckert.”

“Beckert? Beckert was no catcher.”

“Artistic license,” he says.

His play is perfect. The dialogue, the locker-room humor, Leo Durocher cussing a blue streak, everything. Particularly the setting.

Unaffected by the baseball strike, the “fantasy camp” marches on. It was originated in the 1970s by a real-life old catcher, Randy Hundley, who held another one last week in Arizona. A number of old Cubs were there, Ron Santo among them.

Fantasy camp is where ordinary people spend considerable amounts of money to mingle and single with baseball heroes from their past. The play reunites three ex-Cubs who agree to play ball with the campers, not necessarily for the fun of it.

“As soon as I received this script in the mail and began to read it, I knew it was something I wanted to do,” Mantegna told an appreciative packed house at the Canon.

“When I called up the playwright to tell him, I gave him the highest praise I could give. I told him this was a play I would do, even if he wasn’t Ron Santo’s son.”

The two-act comedy, called “A Rough in the Diamond,” is the second baseball-themed work by Jeff Santo, who has a wonderful ear for all those stories his father has told him about life in the big leagues.

The character of “Joe Gallo” is so near and dear to the younger Santo that already he has written two separate vehicles that feature him, the other being a screenplay about the old ballplayer’s home life.

Jeff was wise to send his play to Mantegna, one of Hollywood’s best and busiest actors. One of my happiest theatergoing experiences was watching Mantegna and Franz co-starring in “The Bleacher Bums,” a comedy about Cub fans that ran in Los Angeles for about as long as any play here has ever run. I can hear those Bleacher Bums heckling that St. Louis Cardinal outfielder to this day.

That play was Mantegna’s baby, all the way. Now he is eager to stage Santo’s hilarious roman a clef about fantasy camp, and anybody would be nuts not to get this show on the road. It’s a sure-fire hit.

On Monday nights at the Canon, new works are often previewed as part of the Patchett Kaufman Entertainment Theatre’s reading series, with support from Showtime cable television. Reading cold from the script, Mantegna performed “A Rough in the Diamond” along with Richard Zavaglia and Richard Portnow, both of whom were terrific as the catcher and first baseman.

In the audience was Jeff Santo, thrilled at the reaction from the crowd.

Unlike Hundley’s son, Todd, who like his father became a big-league catcher, Santo gave up baseball after a fine career at Miami of Ohio to concentrate on his writing. His first play, “The 25th Man,” which had a 12-week run in Chicago, had to do with a ballplayer trying to overcome a bad case of vertigo. That part of it was loosely based on Nick Esasky, a major leaguer who suffers from that condition.

At a fantasy camp, Jeff found himself working with actor John Cusack, who was there preparing to play third baseman Buck Weaver of the 1919 Chicago White Sox for the film “Eight Men Out.” They got to thinking about what a rich premise a fantasy camp could be for a film or play. Santo sat down to write it.

“I remember how the clubhouse would be more entertaining than the camp itself,” he said. “Like my dad and Beckert, and that husband-wife relationship they had--not romantic, obviously, but always going back and forth. Beckert would never buy a damn thing. He’d say, ‘I’m playing golf tomorrow. You got an extra pair of shoes?’ ”

Throw in Pepi and his wig and next thing you know, Santo has himself a play.

Ernie Banks approached him a few days later at Hundley’s fantasy camp in Arizona, merely to say, “I heard your new play is great.” And you know Ernie. He’ll want to see it twice.