Stage Review

TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE

Play by Mat Smart. Directed by Sean Daniels. Presented by Merrimack Repertory Theatre at Nancy L. Donahue Theatre, Lowell. Through March 6. Tickets $23-$60, 978-654-4678, www.mrt.org

LOWELL — As a baseball-besotted kid, I memorized the famous poem by Franklin Pierce Adams about the Chicago Cubs’ early-20th-century infield combination of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.

Titled “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon’’ and told from the perspective of a New York Giants fan watching the legendary Cubs trio execute a double play against his team, it begins: “These are the saddest of possible words: ‘Tinker to Evers to Chance,’?’’ and concludes: “Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: ‘Tinker to Evers to Chance.’?’’

If only more of the poem’s wry self-awareness could be found in Mat Smart’s “Tinker to Evers to Chance,’’ now receiving its regional premiere at Merrimack Repertory Theatre under the direction of Sean Daniels. But what’s on display instead is an overstuffed farrago of clichés, melodrama, and strained parallels. For all its attempts to tug at our heartstrings, the play comes across as contrived and ultimately hollow. Persistent overacting by one of the two cast members in the Merrimack Rep production certainly doesn’t help.

Utilizing hokey flashbacks, “Tinker to Evers to Chance’’ attempts to tap into the mystique of baseball as the ultimate game of second chances, redemption, and rebirth, a sphere where we can connect with otherwise estranged parents, our own pasts, perhaps even our truest selves. “Field of Dreams’’ explored this terrain with more emotional impact, if not necessarily more subtlety.

Whereas that film was about a son and his dead father, the parent-child relationship in “Tinker to Evers to Chance’’ is between a daughter, Lauren (Emily Kitchens) and her missing mother, Nessa. Both are avid fans of the Cubs, a team that last won a World Series in 1908 — when Tinker, Evers and Chance were on the team — and a jersey once worn by Evers is a proud family possession.

But when Lauren arrives in Chicago from New York in October 2003, ready to accompany Nessa to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series, the mother has mysteriously vanished. (That 2003 game, of course, added a bleak new chapter to the tormented history of the Cubs when a fan named Steve Bartman interfered with a potential catch by outfielder Moises Alou and a shot at the World Series subsequently slipped from the Cubs’ grasp.)

The only person Lauren finds in Nessa’s Chicago apartment is RJ (James Craven), the mother’s devoted personal care assistant, and he is plenty worried about Nessa, who has recently suffered a stroke. Before disappearing, Nessa was writing a play about Johnny Evers and about the heartbreak, never healed, the ballplayer experienced when his daughter died very young.

Might there be a parallel in Nessa’s play to the sense of loss she feels vis-à-vis her relationship with her mostly absent daughter Lauren? Might Nessa also be dramatizing her feelings for RJ in the play, in which she depicts the character of Evers, having suffered a stroke, falling in love with his nurse? Does RJ reciprocate Nessa’s feelings? How does all this tie in with RJ’s heartbreak, never healed, over the death of his beloved wife? And will Lauren arrive at a deeper understanding of her mother by play’s end?

“Tinker to Evers to Chance’’ mostly skitters across the surface of these questions, employing dialogue that tends toward the baldly declarative and sentimental. Worsening matters is the fact that Kitchens has the grating habit of verbally italicizing virtually every line she delivers, whether she is portraying Lauren, Nessa at age 17 in a flashback scene, or Johnny Evers.

Craven is more restrained and nuanced; he conveys RJ’s quiet moral force and the emotional tug-of-war going on within him. Yet the clashing performance styles of Kitchens and Craven frequently make it appear that they are acting in two different plays, not just portraying different characters.

“Tinker to Evers to Chance’’ works best when it focuses on what it feels like to be a Cubs fan and on the obsessive, even self-defeating nature of fandom. We Red Sox followers know a bit about riding that see-saw between hope and despair when a world championship drought goes on for decade after decade. Smart’s play abounds in flaws, but it does make you root for the Cubs to win the World Series and finally lay Chicago’s ghosts to rest.

TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE

Play by Mat Smart. Directed by Sean Daniels. Presented by Merrimack Repertory Theatre at Nancy L. Donahue Theatre, Lowell. Through March 6. Tickets $23-$60, 978-654-4678, www.mrt.org

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.