A hilarious look at men’s foibles

The theater world is loaded with plays about women and their subtle relationship skills.

Here, finally, is a funny, well-written and well-performed play about two guys and their almost complete lack of relationship skills. I’m man enough to say it: This play spoke to me.

“Rounding Third” is about two guys, complete opposites, who are thrown together as coaches of their kids’ Little League team. One man, Michael, played with rubber-faced perfection by Reed McColm, is a latte-drinking softie who believes the kids should just have fun. The other, Don, played with iron grimness by Tony Caprile, is a beer-guzzling housepainter who believes that the kids should have fun all right, but the only way to have fun is to win.

Admittedly, this sounds like a generic “Odd Couple” formula, in which two opposites are thrown together and gradually learn they have something in common. Yes, it has elements of that.

Yet playwright Richard Dresser goes beyond this, delivering what amounts to a comic seminar on men and their stunted emotional lives – and their junior-high level of communication. Dresser dives right into this in the very first scene, in which tough guy Don, in a dizzying tour de force of conversational aggression, manages to insinuate that Michael is (1) a loser, (2) an alcoholic, (3) worse, a teetotaler, (4) an untrustworthy dilettante and (5) a complete and utter wuss.

And lest you think that this is one of those plays where Don turns out to have a heart of gold, I can assure you: He gets even meaner as the play goes on. Toward the end of the play he delivers a line breathtaking in its cruelty: “You got a dead wife, which is money in the bank. You’re living my dream.”

Every man knows this type: The guy who scoffs at any show of compassion as weakness.

Dresser does not let Michael off easily, either. He portrays Michael as the kind of guy whose idea of baseball chatter is to stand pretentiously in the dugout and yell, “Be the captains of your own ship!”

In this play, you’ll roll your eyes just as often at Michael, who is clearly a good person, as you will at Don, who clearly is not. That may not serve the cause of humanity, but it certainly serves the cause of comedy.

As a baseball fanatic, I loved the atmosphere created by director Maynard Villers, who doubles as the set designer. The floor is painted with a home plate, batters’ boxes and coaches’ boxes. The men sit on a dugout bench. The music ranges from “Centerfield” to “The Natural.”

Villers also does an effective job of staging this two-man play with an athletic kind of movement. The men roam the field, occasionally delivering pep talks to those of us in the audience (standing in for the kids). During the confrontations between the two men, we even feel menace, helped by the fact that baseball bats make serious weapons.

McColm has the best comic timing and delivery of any actor in Spokane, with a Jack Benny-like ability to milk the most comedy out of the subtlest gesture. Virtually everything McColm did – every line, every facial expression, every pause – made me laugh. Yet his comedy is never broad; it’s always intelligent and restrained.

McColm, in fact, delivered one of the funniest lines I’ve heard all year, when his character is asked if he has much baseball experience. He replies, no, but he does have extensive experience as a competitor in curling. I can’t quote it exactly, because I was laughing too hard to take notes.

Caprile came fully alive as Don, a much more prickly and difficult character. A few lines needed more bite. A line such as, “Don’t ever stab me in the back in front of my team,” cries out for intensity and menace. Yet Caprile also understood that Don is a stoic, a guy who deliberately refrains from showing emotion, i.e., weakness.

Most of the time, Caprile hit exactly the right note when showing the one form of communication Don has mastered: Sarcastic bullying.

It’s not pretty in real life, but on stage, God help us, it’s hilarious.