Institute History
Description
Theatre in New York seems to exist in a world of its own with a unique community, characters, and lifestyle. (During the 1980s, this was even more the case, far from the corporate Times Square of today.) For New Yorkers, the universes of theatre and sports have always had a particular relevance, with a day-to-day effect on people's lives and a significance that gives them allegorical weight.
Game 6 embodies many of these qualities in a marvelously reflective and spirited portrait of a New York playwright who has had a run of bad luck. No, it's more than that. Nicky Rogan (the redoubtable Michael Keaton) is committed to the inevitability of failure and, like certain subcultures of sports fans, lives and dies with a team—the Boston Red Sox—whose fortunes never let him forget this obsession. (Buckner blew it in 1986!)
Working with a rich and superbly rendered script by the inestimable Don DeLillo, director Michael Hoffman constructs the wonderfully rarefied world of a man whose affairs are crumbling even as he plunges forward to open a new play. Nicky tries to relate to real life and write about things he cares for, but as his life falls apart, the archetypal villain of the theatrical world, a poisonously powerful critic (Robert Downey, Jr.) lies in wait, setting up a finale that challenges the fates and opens Nicky to a new understanding of life's vagaries.