Les Keiter’s daughter honors dad with one-woman show

It is a gift as much as it is an art.

Painting the living picture with words, making listeners feel as if they were watching as well. Having the imagination, not to mention the talent, to make a radio broadcast sound so believable few know that — while it is factually based — the baseball game is actually imaginary.

This was the genius of the late Les Keiter, the Hall of Fame broadcaster known for his baseball re-creations of the Giants (first in New York then after their move to San Francisco) as well as the PCL’s Hawaii Islanders.

It is hard to fathom in this age of live televised sports that there was a time when radio was a fan’s only lifeline and, should that team travel outside of the local frequency range, that broadcasters would do play-by-play off game stats received by telegram, teletype or telephone.

There was a market then. Would there be one now?

That was the question at which Keiter’s daughter Cindy took a swing. The Brooklyn-based actor will see if she connected with the pitch beginning on Thursday at The Lion Theater in Manhattan with “Recreating Keiter.”

It’s a one-woman show that pays homage to her dad and opens just days before her 10th Father’s Day without him (Les Keiter died in Kailua on April 14, 2009). The 60-year-old also interjects her story of self-discovery, a journey, she says, that has been “a struggle to find comfort in her own skin” and one where baseball has been a metaphor for life.

“Growing up with him, you learned that sports parallels life,” Keiter said in a telephone interview. “He instilled that in my brothers and sisters that if you fall down, you get back up.

“They say that baseball is like life played out on a field. This whole notion became the skeleton for the play. It literally began in the canoe, scattering his ashes. It is my way of holding on to part of him. He loved doing recreates and I realized I had to keep his recreates going.”

That includes recreating her father’s radio booth onstage where Keiter wears the same kind of earphones her dad did, has an old microphone and does the same sound effects such as hitting a mallet to mimic the ball hitting the bat. The audience members will need to imagine they are looking out on the field; stage left is the third baseline, stage right is the first baseline.

The show will stretch the imagination way outside the baselines of its Ebbetts Field setting. It is an all-star game, the lineup of which could never exist outside of this stage with some of Les Keiter’s favorite players such as Stan Musial, Pee Wee Reese, Willie McCovey and Satchel Paige.

There are 48 pitches, 14 at-bats (no one comes up twice) and it covers 4-1/2 innings over 90 minutes. It opens in the top of the first with the breaks in the innings filled by personal vignettes of Cindy Keiter’s life and that of her family.

“I have this moment where I say, ‘It’s April 15, Jackie Robinson Day, dad died yesterday,” she said. “I go into a rain delay saying the black umbrellas have come out. Just like a pitch, everything changes with one phone call. That happened with the phone call about my dad being gone.”

“Everyone is there for a reason,” said Keiter, who took nearly a year to research the players. “I have Bob Uecker as a catcher. He had 14 home runs but he gets his 15th with me. And I say, ‘No one could see that coming.’”

Again, a metaphor for life. After her first marriage ended, Keiter found love again and “now I’m standing with my wife Lory.”

Lory Henning, recently retired as the longtime stage manager for the Blue Man Group, built the set and is directing “Recreating Keiter.” Their theater connections likely will have celebrities in the seats, including sportscaster Bob Costas on opening night.

Her hope is to take the show on the road, including other cities where her father worked such as Philadelphia and Seattle.

“It would be really neat to bring this to Hawaii,” Keiter said. “It would be an honor and a privilege to bring it home.”