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Lee Blessing’s Cobb opened its run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on November 8, 2000. The drama, based on slugger Ty Cobb’s life, first opened at the Melting Pot Theatre in late spring. While at the Melting Pot, the show hit a home-run with Academy Award-winning actor Kevin Spacey, who decided to support the show financially. Now the Melting Pot (in a “special arrangement” with Spacey and Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions) is presenting Cobb in an open-ended run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre off-Broadway. Broadway.com was onhand at the theater and at Lot 61, where the cast celebrated at a World Series-class opening night party courtesy of GQ Magazine.

	Cobb news item: Kevin Spacey Steps Up
	Cobb news item: Spacey Strikes out
	Trigger Street Productions in Cobb PLAYBILL

Review:

November 17, 2000 

Cobb
Reviewed by Victor Gluck

Presented by The Melting Pot Theatre Company by arrangement with Trigger Street Productions and Kevin Spacey at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street, NYC.

Opened Nov. 8th for an open run.

Ty Cobb may have been the greatest player in baseball history, but he was also "the meanest man in baseball." Lee Blessing's powerful and fascinating play, "Cobb," which has now moved to the Lucille Lortel Theatre from a run at the Melting Pot Theatre Company last season, shows the man with all his imperfections. The play is more than a study of baseball: as Blessing's Cobb tells us in the opening scene, his life was a Greek tragedy from the beginning.

Blessing fantasizes Cobb interacting with himself at three stages of his life: the young ballplayer in his prime, the successful businessman, and the broken old man in retirement. Playing these personas, Michael Sabatino has the passion and youthful exuberance of the beginner, Mathew Mabe* has the cynicism of the millionaire star, and Michael Cullen has the anger of the misanthrope who feels cheated and misunderstood. The only other character is Cobb's nemesis, Oscar Charleston, known as the "Black Cobb," played with subtle power by Clark Jackson. Director Joe Brancato keeps the play unfolding like a mystery, yet never lets the transitions or multiple characterizations become confusing.

Each Blessing play creates an entirely new dramatic form. "Cobb" brings the protagonist back from the grave to defend his life. As he tries to white-wash or reinvent himself, the earlier selves unwittingly offer pieces of the puzzle: his mother shooting his father when Cobb was 17, his continual fights and convictions, his rivalry with Babe Ruth, his years as star player of the Detroit Tigers when no one would room with him. And yet this was the first player voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the man who led the record of 96 stolen bases for 47 years, and turned baseball into the national pastime and sports into big business.

BACK STAGE 
page 56

*Mathew Mabe was on Broadway with Kevin in The Iceman Cometh in 1999.

Driving Mr. Spacey!: The positively untrue life and times of Kevin Spacey,
with a few real facts thrown in for fun.

All collages and photo enhancements were done by me using Microsoft® Picture It!® 99