American idols Radio Golf; Take Me Out; Into the Woods BY CAROLYN CLAY

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was August Wilson’s Hopkinton. Last week at Yale Repertory Theatre, two decades and a couple of Pulitzers later, the playwright crossed the finish line of an unprecedented American playwriting marathon. With the world premiere of Radio Golf (through May 15), he completes his 10-play cycle chronicling decade by decade the African-American experience of the 20th century. That he pulls off the task is on a par with Joyce’s finishing Finnegans Wake (though the end product is more accessible). But Radio Golf is a bit of a surprise. Perhaps because it’s set in 1997 rather than in the interstices of black history, it plays less to Wilson’s customary strengths: the rich, colorful characters; the bluesy language; the poetic evocation of the wounding legacy of slavery. It is, however, the most focused Wilson work in a while, crackling with the debate over whether to revitalize traditional culture and community or "redevelop" by, in essence, tearing down history. Aficionados of Wilson, who finds beauty in biscuits and inspiration in the blighted streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill district, will have no trouble guessing which side he comes down on.

The play is set in the storefront office of Bedford Hills Redevelopment, Inc., where two successful black businessmen — real-estate agent and mayoral aspirant Harmond Wilks and golf-obsessed bank vice-president Roosevelt Hicks — plot the urban renewal of the Hill, once a thriving black community where Wilson grew up. On an easel is an architect’s rendering of a sleek, impersonal apartment complex that requires only two things to become bricks and mortar: the official declaration of the neighborhood as "blighted," which will unlock federal funds, and the demolition of the "raggedy" house at 1839 Wylie Avenue that just happens to be the spiritual center of Wilson’s œuvre. Whoops.

Wilson fails to tell us in Radio Golf why it is unconscionable to take a wrecking ball to the home of the iconic Aunt Ester, guide to the mythic "City of Bones" of the Middle Passage. Harmond’s sudden zeal to save the house is chalked up to its stained glass and Brazilian wood staircase; those familiar with Gem of the Ocean and other Wilson works in which the venerable Ester is invoked will understand her passed-down identity as symbolic of the black presence in America since the first slave ships, and the conflict of the play — whose dramatis personae include two descendants of characters in Gem as well as feisty ex-con Sterling Johnson from Two Trains Running — will resonate for them at a deeper level.

Closer to the realistic, real-estate-centric surface, Radio Golf revolves around a dispute between the business venture of Harmond and Roosevelt and an eccentric oldster called Elder Joseph Barlow who turns up to paint the run-down house he claims to own. Raspily incarnated by the gravel-throated Anthony Chisholm and waving his checkered past like a flag, "Old Joe" is a raconteurish repository of history who turns a blind eye to the legal rules that would seem to have robbed him of his property. His cause is championed by Sterling (a sly John Earl Jelks), now a small-time contractor who claims to be his "own union" and counts as his "résumé" a recently repaired porch. Whatever the more sartorially resplendent Harmond and Roosevelt have to say, as far as Sterling is concerned, it’s the cowboys disenfranchising the Indians all over again; at one point he dips his fingers into a bucket of red intended for Aunt Ester’s door and daubs himself with war paint to make his point.

Just as Radio Golf (which takes its name from a Car Talk–type feature Roosevelt inaugurates on a radio station he and Harmond have taken over) is less amorphous in shape than some Wilson works, it is also more didactic in tone. As Wilson told the New York Times, the play is an indictment of "the black middle class, and what I see as their failure to return the sophistication and expertise and resources they have gained to the communities and the people they belong to." Roosevelt — sharply played by James A. Williams, who stretches silk over street toughness — is wrong to embrace the white-capitalist-insider dream. Harmond is right to become Saul converted at Damascus, even if it means shooting himself in the financial and political feet. But Harmond’s turn-around from system-embracing grandson of Gem’s opportunistic Caesar to paint-wielding community guerrilla, however embraced by the elegant Richard Brooks, needs to be less abrupt. And the character of Harmond’s materialistic wife, though Wilson tries to flesh her out with a second-act aria of marital disappointment given bravura delivery by Michele Shay, is one of his most undernourished. (The play moves next to the Mark Taper Forum, where the rewrite-happy playwright will continue to tinker.)

But what an accomplishment is the completion of this luminous if uneven cycle of plays. Ditto the creation, over the years, of what amounts to a repertory company that includes all five of the excellent, Wilson-seasoned players on the Yale Rep stage, under the direction of Timothy Douglas. He’s new to the Wilson flagship helm but no stranger to the saga. When Ma Rainey made its debut in 1984 in the same space, Douglas, a student at Yale School of Drama, was an understudy.

Even more all-American than real estate is baseball, and SpeakEasy Stage Company and Boston Theatre Works (with an assist from Broadway in Boston) have teamed up to present the Boston premiere of Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning, wasps’-nest-whacking homage to the game, Take Me Out (at the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion through June 11). Indeed, in the play’s keynote speech, a geeky gay financial manager, newly smitten with the game, calls it, with its equality of opportunity and lack of a clock, "a perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society." Like any Horatio Alger venue, however, baseball has its tricky balances, and in Take Me Out the locker-room equilibrium is tipped when bi-racial superstar centerfielder Darren Lemming casually announces to the media that he’s gay. Throw in the acquisition from the minors of a redneck relief pitcher who claims to tolerate "the gooks an’ the spics an’ the coons" but doesn’t like to shower with a "faggot" and you’re no longer banging the drum slowly.

Greenberg’s play is that rarity, a consistently entertaining commercial work (think Bull Durham as recoined by Oscar Wilde) that also speaks to what’s best and worst in the nation. Inspired more his own late-blooming infatuation with America’s pastime than by the demigodliness of Yankee Derek Jeter or the coming-out tale of baseball’s Billy Bean, the play captures the exhilarating way in which sport (one of few enterprises in which "people of color are routinely adulated by people of pallor") can catch us up and trip us up, its highs and lows approximating the exaltation and the crashes of Greek tragedy. And Paul Daigneault’s production for SpeakEasy and BTW, if it doesn’t have the giddy swirl and Yankee Stadium shadow of Joe Montello’s 2002 staging for London’s Donmar Warehouse and New York’s Public Theatre (it transferred to Broadway in 2003), gets the job done smartly while fielding several standout performances.

The tale is told, with an emphasis on its inexorability, by Empires (read Yankees, right down to the pinstripes) shortstop Kippy Sunderstrom (played with deadpan intelligence by Nathaniel McIntyre), whom Greenberg fashions as an ironist and an "intellectual." The play’s events emanate, Kippy opines, from best pal Lemming’s revelation — made simply because it could be, or so the confident superstar thought, without putting a dent in either his image or his team’s dynamic, and because he had been encouraged by a pontificating childhood friend and fellow all-star to manifest his "true nature." It turns out coming out of the closet was not what the Bible Belt batter had in mind.

Much of the play takes place in the Empires’ locker room, which comes complete with working showers whose drains, in Eric Levenson’s blue-sky-and-green-field-invoking set, are exposed by folding back a wedge of floor. Eight of the play’s 11 characters (including two Latino ballplayers and the Japanese pitcher who has no English, preferring to Americanize by making his mind "a prairie") do time under the jets, managing to act while naked and wet. Outside, the clothed world is the oyster of Neil A. Casey’s goofily blossoming Mason Marzac, the playwright’s wish-fulfilling mouthpiece in the form of Lemming’s new money manager, who in order to relate better to his famous client sets out to learn baseball and falls hopelessly, haplessly, under its spell, finding both community and "the first crowd I had ever agreed with."

The friendship between the effeminate financial adviser and the aloof sports star, both outsiders though one feels above and the other beneath his peers, is unlikely. But the character of ball-besotted Mason is a delight, his euphoria captured here with frisky sincerity by Neil A. Casey. Also arresting is newcomer Christopher Brophy as the redneck Shane Mungitt — though Brophy’s reliever is an unschooled, overwhelmed brute lacking the perverse innocence Frederick Weller brought to the role on Broadway. At the center of the production, of course, is Ricardo Walker’s smoldering, athletic Lemming, who could use a bit more charisma.

He might try picking the pockets of Todd Alan Johnson. Stanislavsky said there are no small actors, only small parts, and Johnson, walking off with the New Repertory Theatre’s Into the Woods (through May 29), shows what a skillfully large actor can do with a couple of small parts. Playing the vengeful barber in New Rep’s fine chamber staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Johnson showed he can tear a melodramatic passion to tatters and wrap his chops around a difficult score. Here he does it again while, as the libidinously Jack Nicholsonian Wolf, also getting his chops around the bristling corpus of Veronica J. Kuehn’s amusingly revved-up Red Riding Hood. Then as Cinderella’s Prince, a wolf in hero’s clothing, turning on the smarmy charm while leaping o’er tree trunks, he turns around and steals the show from himself.

Not that the rest of the production is easy booty for a thespian bandit. Rick Lombardo’s revival of the Tony-winning (for score and book) 1987 Sondheim/James Lapine Freudian fairy tale gone wrong crowds the tiny New Rep stage (the troupe moves next fall to larger, spanking-new quarters at the Arsenal Center for the Arts), and the set design by Peter Colao — vertical tomes that open into storybook scenes — is prosaic. (You can forget about "steps of the palace" for Cinderella to sprawl upon.) But it’s hard not to be lured into the Bettelheimian copse of sexual and existential danger into which Sondheim and Lapine enfold kid lit. And the likable New Rep cast manages the twist between the musical’s cartoon first act, which takes the characters of overlapping fairy tales to the brink of happily-ever-after, and its poignant second, which introduces disillusion, death, and community forged by sorrow, all before bouncing back into the infectious title tune.

Sondheim’s score, as clever as the show itself, mixes saucy pulsing, complex dissonance, and haunting melody ("No One Is Alone," "Children Will Listen"). But for all the fun that laces through it, it’s damn difficult to sing. Under the musical direction of Todd C. Gordon and associate Steven Bergman (who conducted opening night), the performers — standing in for iconic personae from Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood, along with an added baker and his wife with infertility problems — handle it to varying degrees of perfection. When the mix of storybook emotion and pitch-perfect warbling is on — as in the two "Agony" duets by Johnson and Andrew Giordano or Leigh Barrett’s performance as the baker’s wife (especially following a giddy, troubling quickie in the woods) — the result, whether satiric or heartfelt, is buoyant. Some of Sondheim veteran Nancy E. Carroll’s singing, as the Witch brought to sorrow when she sheds her nasal prosthesis, is satisfying, bristling with enunciation and shaded by subtle vibrato. At other times, her sound is grating. And her baby-snatching enchantress has little dimension beyond tough and depressed. Throw in a little Glinda; children will listen.