Career Curve Ball

When playwright Vince McKewin was a teenager, his dream was playing professional baseball. He was 17 when he had his big chance, a day’s tryout with a triple-A team.

“I couldn’t hit a curve ball,” he said. “That drive home with my father, I’ll never forget. I thought my world was over, but obviously it wasn’t.”

His first play, “Two Outs, Bottom of the Ninth,” was the result of that disappointment. When it opened in Hollywood in 1983, it was a hit, and Theatre East is staging a revival of the play, beginning this weekend.

As McKewin found out, the blow of a failed baseball career wasn’t the end of everything. He was always a writer, he said, back to his high school days, even though his route took a couple of detours before he found success.

After college, McKewin wrote for a small magazine, then went to work for a New York advertising agency. Then another dream struck, and he started studying acting at New York’s HB Studios, with Uta Hagen and Herbert Berghoff. It was acting that brought him to California, and the studio of acting guru Gordon Hunt.

McKewin needed monologues, and the baseball incident inspired him. Hunt liked what McKewin wrote and encouraged him to write other monologues to create a play.

“It needed a theme,” McKewin said, “so I just made up a statistic that, any night between April and October, eight people associated with the profession will try to get out of baseball. But there’s something bittersweet about giving up--when one is forced to give up their dreams.”

He now has a healthy career as a screenwriter, but he still writes plays. His second, “The Carney Rod and Gun Club,” had a successful run at Burbank’s Victory Theatre some years back. And his “Ad Wars” premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and later was a hit in Hollywood.

The busy screenwriter’s “The Climb,” starring John Hurt and David Strathairn will be released this fall. McKewin also wrote Carol Ballard’s critically acclaimed “Fly Away Home,” but the theater keeps calling him back.

That disappointing curve ball helped create “Two Outs,” and his time in the advertising game was the source of “Ad Wars.”

The lesson learned from that triple-A league pitcher is still very fresh in his memory.

“The end of something,” he said, “doesn’t necessarily help the next beginning. You’ve got to have your dreams and hold on to them as long as you can.”

“Two Outs, Bottom of the Ninth,” Theatre East, 12655 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Aug. 31. $18. (818) 760-4160.

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Must the Show Go On? Dreams, and memories, are also at the core of Grace Lovelace-Pennyfeather’s “Actors,” opening this weekend at the Chamber Theatre.

Lovelace-Pennyfeather had a dream, too, of being an actress, but some professional curve balls sent her back to academia, teaching in Tasmania. She did manage to write a play about her stage career, however, and handed it to old friend, actor-director Bruce Heighley.

Heighley directs this world premiere and also appears as a bitter has-been thespian reduced to an understudy. His dressing-room mate is a mature actress still living with the dream of success.

Heighley says, “There are a lot of people who have thrust themselves into a lifestyle to which they aren’t accustomed. They’ve had to train themselves to be a part of it, to be a part of that act. then they realize it’s not so rose-colored.”

“Actors,” Chamber Theatre, 3759 Cahuenga Blvd. West, North Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 9. $15. (818) 501-0495.