Theater review: Uneven 'Redshirts' yields a few cheers

There is a pivotal scene in "Redshirts," Dana Yeaton's ripped-from-the-headlines drama about a cheating scandal in a university athletic program. Cocksure running back Dante Green (James T. Alfred) confronts the accusing professor, played with regal steeliness by Regina Williams.

"You've got issues," he says forcefully to her. She agrees, but not precisely in the way he's implying. In the play's best moment, she lists the price that African-Americans have paid -- including braving snarling dogs and water hoses -- so that someone like Dante could have such a college opportunity.

Both the stern professor and the cavalier star athlete are moved by the encounter, each breaking their façades. Unfortunately, that poignant moment is exceptional in Yeaton's earnest, misshapen and sometimes facile work.

In the drama, making its world premiere at Penumbra Theatre, Yeaton takes on a timely issue with repercussions beyond the playing field. (Much of the action takes place near an end zone in Lance Brockman's set, where desks and chairs are slid onto the football field.)

"Redshirts," directed by Lou Bellamy, has its own dramaturgical issues; it doesn't really seem to believe in itself as anything but a topical after-school special. Despite the iconic, slow-motion entry of the suited-up actors -- an opening scene that suggests something almost epic -- the play begins and ends with a strange listlessness, unsure of what it is or wants to say.

Still, amid this crisis of confidence, it has a strong, solid middle.

If "Redshirts" is worth seeing, it's for both the veteran and new talent onstage at Penumbra. Williams delivers a finely drawn professor, both stern and sympathetic. James Craven's coach is nuanced and likable. As a student-athlete who has had a concussion, Ahanti Young is an almost lobotomized figure on the blink. Alfred, who is making his Penumbra debut, invests Dante with a curled, almost sneering lip and a lot of unruly testosterone.

But the script needs work. In one particular playwriting convention, the action freezes and Dante steps out of the tableaux to act the role of Greek chorus, delivering rhymed asides -- raps, really -- to the audience. An interesting technique, but it does not further the narrative.

What "Redshirts" does show is a world of people with hardened perceptions, including a tutor who believes, deep down, that the football players are glorified animals. The play shows the players being caught between many forces as they get chewed up.

Ironically, that may mean an opportunity to truly learn something that they have a hard time getting into, like, say, the poetry of Robert Frost and Claude McKay.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390

Rohan Preston • rpreston@startribune.com