Playwright Rebecca Gilman's rapid rise from the obscurity of temporary office jobs in Chicago to international literary acclaim began when her play The Glory of Living premiered at the Windy City's Circle Theatre in December, 1996. Winning numerous awards, the play was subsequently staged at London's Royal Court Theatre (1999) and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Subsequent plays were produced at such prestigious venues as Lincoln Center, the Goodman Theatre, and the Manhattan Theatre Club. Awards and grant monies were lavished upon the prolific writer as she continued to create new works.
    Her latest play, The Sweetest Swing in Baseball, first played at the Royal Court and now is receiving its American premiere at the Magic Theatre. If the content of the play has a connection to Ms. Gilman's own reality, it would seem that the post-acclaim road has been a rocky one. The Sweetest Thing centers on an artist, Dana Fielding (Barbara Pitts), a painter who has had sudden success, only to be plagued by subsequent doubts as to whether her work is really any good, whether or not her fickle dealer and the fickle critics and the fickle buyers will continue to endorse her ongoing efforts.
    At the opening of her new show, Dana remains in the back room of the gallery with a serious case of the jitters. Her fears about the reception for her work are compounded by her conviction that her boyfriend is leaving her--with her career in ascendancy her star has outshone his. The second scene moves quickly ahead to a mental hospital where Dana is seen with her wrists bandaged. She has attempted suicide. Her fellow patients are Gary (Michael Ray Wisely), a homicidal stalker, and Michael (Joseph Parks), an alcoholic computer programmer.
    Dana refuses to take the drugs suggested by her therapist, fearing they will affect her creativity. Then, when she learns that her insurance will only pay for ten days at the hospital, she seeks a new diagnosis, feigning schizophrenia by pretending that she suffers under the delusion that she is the baseball player Darryl Strawberry. The real Strawberry achieved major stardom, but then rode a roller coaster of a career. He was a perpetrator of domestic violence. He was dogged by injuries and a bout with colon cancer. He gamely made a comeback but was pulled down by alcohol and drugs. Dana clearly finds an alter ego in this fabled character as does, one suspects, Ms. Gilman herself.
    With a series of short scenes and often clever, rapid-fire dialogue, Gilman touches on many aspects of the artist's relationship with the rest of the world--the way that the fun of creativity is turned into work by the demands of success, the love-hate relationship between the public and its heroes, the resentment met by success, the abrasive meeting of art and commerce. Gilman finds some bitter humor as she explores these themes and she astutely avoids the predictable outcomes.
    But the play and Gilman's rich font of ideas never take on the emotional weight that would constitute a powerful statement of her themes or a fully satisfying evening of theater. None of these characters--not even Dana--is fleshed out fully enough to engender audience empathy. The jump from the jittery opening night to the suicide attempt, for example, is unconvincing. Gilman tries to create sufficient motivation by adding the perceived departure of the boyfriend, but she hasn't established dramatically the depth of the relationship beforehand, so it doesn't provide the needed incitement to such drastic action.
    The weakness of the script doesn't find needed assistance in the performances, perhaps due to insufficient rehearsal time. The only actor who fully inhabits his role is Joseph Parks who finds a natural ease as Michael. The others deliver their lines with finesse but none seems to have gotten under the skin of the characters. This is especially problematic for the difficult, but central role of Dana. Barbara Pitts well expresses the nervousness and insecurity of the first act, but her transformation in the second isn't fully internalized.