By Chip Dombrowski, Entertainment Editor

Villains target baseball team, real-life characters at Sawdust Theatre

COQUILLE — Coquille’s prominent citizens have something new to look forward to: the possibility of being immortalized as characters in a play at the Sawdust Theatre.

Last year’s experiment with mixing reality into the theater’s customary melodrama — a play loosely based on the life of the late Camilla Lorenz Reitman — may have become a revolution. Call it historical melodrama: half of the characters in this year’s play — “The Pride of the Sawdust League, or Three Strikes and You’re Out,” which runs all summer at the Coquille theater — are based on real people.

“I think people were really receptive, especially people that are from this area, because everyone knows everyone,” said co-author Cindy Robnett. “It gave people a hook.”

Robnett expanded on the concept by bringing in a variety of people connected to the Coquille Loggers, a minor league baseball team that existed in various forms from the 1890s until the 1950s, according to Bob Taylor of the Coquille Valley Museum. There was a whole league of teams sponsored by local mills, Robnett said.

The play includes characters based on Bill Fortier, the team’s manager for many years and owner of Bill’s Place from 1928 to 1953; original Sawdusters Ben and Shirley Barton, with Ben having been a batboy in 1935-36; Grace Greenough, a devoted fan of the team; and an anonymous player from out of town called Cutie by Greenough and other Coquille High School students in the late 1920s and early ’30s.

The only member of the group still living, Shirley Barton didn’t know what to make of being written into the story.

“It’s sorta weird,” said Barton, 79. “It’s flattering.”

While last year’s play, also co-written by Robnett, was the first to include a real person, the idea has been bouncing around for a while. Robnett said she began writing this play 15 years ago with Pam McKiney, whose death last year prompted her to finish the play with Marcella Russell, who also directs. Greenough, whose memories of the Loggers inspired the play, and Ben Barton also died last year.

Though the relevant time period for most of the real-life characters is the 1930s, Robnett said the play is set in the Sawdusters’ usual turn-of-20th-century era.

“We try to keep everything period with costume and the verbage that we use in the play,” Robnett said, adding she uses her grandma’s thesaurus to help keep the language dated.

But the throwback to the past isn’t a deterrent for the teen actors who play leading roles, including Michael Meichsner, 14, and Ryann Jack, 15.

“The audience participation makes it fun, especially for us, the newer people,” Jack said. “We’re too young to understand some of the things because it’s about Coquille history.”

Jack said she likes Sawdust because it’s so different from any other theater. Meichsner wasn’t sure that was such a good thing, at least at first.

“I thought it was kind of crazy, but it grows on you, I guess,” he said. “It’s like a fly. Once it lands, you can’t get it to go away.”

The play

In a bid to win the Sawdust League pennant, the Coquille Loggers have recruited ace pitcher Homer Striker (Michael Meichsner, Ed Tyner) from Myrtle Creek.

Also hoping for a spot on the team is Gracie Pennant (Ryann Jack, Johnna Wheeler), who frequently drags her friend Bernice (Nicole Browning, Jessica Tibbits) away from knitting and baking to play catch. Though Gracie’s father, Percival (Sean Wirebaugh, Robert Givens) is the team owner, she knows she must disguise herself as a boy to make it.

With two new stars, the Loggers might have a chance to beat the Bandon team, which has a payroll to match the Yankees. But Phineous Foul (Ken Stratton, Alexander Goble) has other ideas. He wants them to lose, driving down the price, so he can buy the team and move it to Marshfield.

He enlists the help of Diamond Delarue (Deb Keeler, Shelby Moody), a socialite from Myrtle Point with an insatiable thirst for Logger’s Liniment, an herbal medicine with an apparently high alcohol content. The drink is made by her nurse, Shirley Swing (Peggy Robison, Sharon Usselman), who takes a liking to Mr. Foul’s assistant, Benjamin Barton (Rick Green, Ralph Foord), an aspiring batmaker.

Phineous and Diamond plot to kidnap team manager Bill Fortier (Arbie Gillaspie, Al Gnann) at a social organized by Belle Amour (Terri Russell, Dian Courtright), who is eager to fix up Homer with a young lady.

He’s not so sure about dating — especially when he’s going through a “Twelfth Night” identity crisis and the only one who’s caught his eye is a guy — or so he thinks.

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