Review: Love and Baseball

Local playwright Jerry Montoya is pretty savvy to name his play Love and Baseball—appealing to a wide audience interested in either relationships or sports, or both. In fact, the B Street Theatre’s marketing materials for Love and Baseball claim the play has “just the right amount of romance and sports to be entertaining to men and women alike.”

And judging by the reactions on opening night of the play’s debut, Montoya was right on—reactions were pretty amusing with the women nodding in recognition when the dialogue centered on relationships and gender differences while the men visibly perked up when baseball trivia was delivered, along with re-enactments of historic baseball moments.

Love and Baseball is the story of a roller-coaster relationship between a community college philosophy instructor Michele (Brittni Barger) and a baseball fanatic and documentary filmmaker Will (Brian Rife).

The strength of the production is the snappy repartee and fun baseball moments enacted by the two actors—Barger, who delivered a memorable Nora in Capital Stage’s recent production of A Doll’s House and gives a sharp performance here, and Rife, who captures the quirkiness of a baseball-loving bachelor.

The weakness of the play is rooted in its scenarios and plotlines of convenience where we’re to believe or care that these two verbal sparring partners who only meet three times for a couple of hours in a span of five years are destined to be together. In a baseball analogy, they have swung and missed twice and in the third act, they will either call it outs or hit a home run.

But if you keep logic deeply hidden in the dugout, and simply enjoy watching the competitive games of Love and Baseball play out, it’s an enjoyable outing.