In its way, that sound will become a sort of symbol for the tense, well-crafted action that will occupy the next couple of hours.
Brendon Bates?s ?The Savior of Fenway? is precisely the kind of galvanic, muscular work the annual New York International Fringe Festival was created to discover, house and promote.
Four men, all well-known to each other, three of them from Boston?s working-class Irish enclave, gather in a pub in Quincy to bemoan the losing season their beloved Red Sox have just suffered.
So dire has the Sox?s record been during the previous few seasons that the very existence of the team?s home field, Fenway Park, is threatened, or at least that?s what Walshie, the bar?s owner, the embittered, intolerant Sweeney, and the violent Shane McGill believe to be the reality.
The fourth man, Patty Lentz, who has a part-time job cleaning up the place, the youngest of the quartet, is a handsome, fresh-faced lad who used to be, as he puts it, ?the best shortstop in Eastern Massachusetts,? but who gave up his hopes of playing ball in the majors in order to look after his ailing mother.
McGill, who is described as ?a good man who likes to break stuff,? is a bearlike, dangerous and probably psychotic individual who is, in a way, the burden borne by Sweeney, Walshie and even by Patty.
It was McGill, it soon becomes clear, who was responsible for the crash heard just before Jennifer Schriever?s lights came up on Josh Zangen?s convincingly battered barroom set.
Bates?s richly written play deals with the steely grip sport has on certain segments of the American male population, disappointed and often deeply angry men who live vicariously through the fortunes of their athletic heroes.
In some ways, ?The Savior of Fenway? is a sort of cousin of the late Jason Miller?s prize-winning ?That Championship Season,? and even this season?s big winner, ?Take Me Out.?
Well paced by director Michael Laibson, who has worked extensively off-Broadway and in daytime television; playwright Bates?s accurate, knowing dialogue whips and flashes around the stage like a high-tension wire downed in a thunderstorm.
Patty?s unseen older brother, Martin, is having a dangerous affair with McGill?s wife, who often wears sunglasses to hide the marks of the beatings administered by her violence-prone spouse.
The edgy, inherently furious Sweeney, functions as a kind of peacemaker, trying to keep McGill under something like control, and, at the same time, indulging the hostility he feels toward Patty, whose youth, charm and attractiveness serve to remind him that his best days are fairly far behind him.
Walshie, who?s realistic enough to know that keeping a pistol hidden in the bar, not to mention an unregistered rifle, isn?t necessarily a bad idea, is a neutral figure, at least until he?s had a few uncharacteristic drinks.
?The Savior of Fenway? could be said to be old-fashioned in its rock-solid construction and its crystal-clear plotline, but of such materials resonant theater is made, particularly when the actors are as good as this particular ?Fenway? four are.
Joe Burch manages to make Sweeney both sympathetic and vaguely frightening at the same time, while Nate Meyer?s concerned barman seems slightly conventional until alcohol helps him slip the bounds of self-restraint after the intermission.
John Highsmith?s boyish Patty, not quite as innocent as he seems at first to be, fills his role to perfection, a feat aided by his superb reproduction of Boston speech patterns.
The toughest role, probably, is that of the brutish, intolerable, severely damaged McGill, a loose cannon if ever one were. Not quite a monster, not quite a victim, this late-arriving gorilla is played to the hilt, and to great effect, by the play?s author, Brendon Bates.
?The Savior of Fenway? a life beyond the fringe, and, with any luck at all, its many virtues will be rewarded.