A Whole New Ballgame For Ernie

At the top of the first, the house lights dim. When lights come up, they are sharp, and they shine on the house. The accompanying booming sound is stronger than the distant thunder we’ll hear later. And Ernie, the affectionate documentary about broadcaster Ernie Harwell by Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom, is in full swing.

Our setting is a rainy day in 2009 on the service level of Comerica Stadium in a nostalgic version of the tunnel where Harwell always waited before going into the booth for the Tigers. This is furnished with a US flag and the stuff of storage—boxes, a trash bin, a metal ladder on wheels to reach things. Upstage are three large projection screens, two of them separated by World Series posters from 1935 and 1945.  Harwell, 91, is about to give his farewell address when he meets a boy dressed in a suit with short pants and ankle boots, who asks him to recount major moments in his life and career. What transpires isn’t exactly a play; Albom has created a whole new ballgame. Director Tony Caselli says it’s “a mix of traditional play and ballpark attraction, and a moving biography piece about a beloved person from Detroit, all built largely for a sports audience as much as a theatre-going audience, with a lot of wonderful multimedia layered in.” Harwell shares anecdotes, often illustrated by stills and video footage—key moments he covered, his encounters with baseball luminaries, and moments from his personal life.

Scenic designer Kirk Domer found research easy, with Comerica Park right across the street from the theatre. Sizing the projection screens was less easy. “The key to designing the world of the play was to incorporate a series of projection screens that aided in telling the story,” says Domer. “The exciting challenge was to find the appropriate screen size or sizes with the limited throw distance in the 400-seat City Theatre,” without overwhelming the action. The rest of the design team had more significant challenges. Major League Baseball, WDIV-TV, Detroit Public Library, and Detroit Free Press were among those who provided images and footage for projection designer Alison Dobbins, who had to create projections from videos and stills that had been shot over a period of years, some in black and white. Some had been taken by high-definition cameras, some by standard cameras. Frame rates and image sizes varied. Some footage was grainy, some sharp. Since characters sometimes talk about disconnected moments in the same scene, footage from different periods would be shown in sequence.

Another issue was the optics of the dual-lamp projector system. “One is front-projected, and two are rear-projected and closer to the screens,” Dobbins says. Choice of materials was tricky. “If you front-project on muslin, it doesn’t have the same spread as synthetic projection materials. If you’re sitting off to the side, the center screen is dim. The show is very amber, and projectors are very blue. We tried to match the amber, but it came out with more of an orange hint. We wanted it to blend into the scenery. It’s very hard with modern footage to achieve that. Amber makes it look old, sepia-like. Modern footage sticks out.” Moreover, fast-changing baseball images and video have to blend with lighting and sound cues as well as dialogue and stage movement. Sound designer Steve Shannon, production director for Albom’s radio show, had never designed for the theatre. On his first outing, he had to time sound cues precisely with video, lighting, and acting cues, introduce music as rehearsals progressed, synchronize radio calls to video that illustrated what was on the radio, and restore or replace audio when sound was poor on the videos. And the baseball video had problems of its own. Dobbins, who had done a lot of narrative film but no sports video, discovered, she says, “If you start a pitch, you have to finish that pitch.”