Eephus and a Playwright at Midlife

The author relates his youthful love of baseball and how a family trauma led him to exchange his ambition to play professional baseball for an ambition to become a playwright. Now an established playwright, he investigates the film Eephus (Carson Lund, 2025) from a dramaturgical perspective. He focuses on the film’s lack of overt dramatic action, and how the characters function like a seriocomic Greek chorus, developing themes of time, loss, and mortality. The author then applies these themes to the predicament of playwrights and screenwriters in the post-COVID age of dwindling in-person audiences and cultural timidity. The essay concludes with the affirmation that these artists will continue to seek out avenues for creativity in the face of these diminishments.