Bang The Drum Slowly Book

THE STORY: From what may be the greatest novel about baseball ever written comes a profoundly moving play. Set in 1956, the play concerns the New York Mammoths, a fictional baseball team. As with any season, the goal is to reach the World Series, but this year, there's more at stake than usual. Star pitcher, Henry Author Wiggens learns that his roommate, Bruce Pearson, the team's third string catcher, is coping with a fatal disease. A simple farmboy from Georgia with no true friends other than Author, Bruce convinces Author to cover for him lest he get kicked off the team. Coming nose to nose against the team's manager and his teammates' prejudice against the quiet dignity of Bruce, Author can only forestall the inevitable disclosure of what's happening. By the time the team actually nears wining the pennant, and the play reaches its heartbreaking conclusion, Author and Bruce will have formed a friendship that allows Bruce the dignity he deserves, forever changing Author, and the audience is in tears yet exalted by the beauty of the human spirit. Eric Simonson's beautifully imagined adaptation of Mark Harris' novel is in many ways the stage equivalent of a lusciously layered and moving work of prose literature, a marvel of simplicity in the depth of its feeling, while at the same time a profound reverie on the losing human contest against mortality‚¬¦confronts death with complexity, never settling for easy sentiment, and is all the more stirring as a result. - Chicago Tribune. There's no denying the humor and power of the work, nor the audience's three-hankie response‚¬¦a fascinating textural portrait of our national image. - Boston Herald.