'God Bless Baseball': National pasttime as a metaphor for geopolitics

Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada may or may not like baseball, but he holds a soft spot for millennials. His sinister, slightly funny, and intelligent

God Bless Baseball

, which played Jan. 22-23 at Fringe Arts, teems with insights in its allegorical look at a game that's as American as apple pie and global economic domination.

Okada's play starts innocently enough. On Tadasu Takamine's set, two twenty-something women (Aoi Nozu and Sung Hee Wi) stand inside a baseball diamond. One Japanese, one Korean, their words appear in English on a pair of short screens that flank a giant, imposing white disc that resembles the inside of an umbrella.

Each repeats phrases, articulated with exaggerated gestures (dragging a foot quizzically, bending knees in and out). "I don't understand the rules of baseball," the pair starts before puzzling over aspects of the game. A slightly older man (Yoon Jae Lee) tries to clarify, his convoluted explanation interspersed with deep-rooted contempt for his father, who loved the game, as do many in Japan and Korea (where, like America, it ranks as national pastime).

But Okada ultimately uses baseball as an allegory: for careers, for life, for generational conflict, for the continued hostility between Japan and Korea stemming from World War I, and for the sort of economic and political meddling inflicted on both countries by the United States and the International Monetary Fund.

This allegorical approach takes an eerie, menacing tone with the arrival of Ichiro Suzuki (Pijin Neji), the legendary Seattle Mariner player and national hero in Japan. Although a little short to impersonate the 5-foot-11 Ichiro, Neji nails his setup and pendulum-like bat-swinging style (with slight exaggerations, drawing laughs from fans).

During a five-minute stretch of physical contortion, Neji's exceptional body control illuminates the idea that "nothing about you is owned by you," and he picks up pieces of the set to emphasize that "in the major leagues" operates as a metaphor for the entrance of nation-states into the globalist elite, as well as for individuals moving up the corporate ladder, and that baseball itself is war (and conquest) by other means.

Under Okada's direction, Ichiro's long-winded descants on baseball's "real" meaning balances against his protracted intimidation of other characters (the concept of an "inning" itself is a major theme).

And we come to realize that these young people no longer want the safety of tradition or structure, any more than they want their lives disrupted by actuarial processes in New York or Brussels. Quite simply, they don't want to run bases and score runs, but want out entirely. That Okada takes 100 drawn-out minutes to develop this point bears one more similarity to the titular game.