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Greenberg’s play is that rarity, a consistently entertaining commercial work (think Bull Durham as recoined by Oscar Wilde) that also speaks to what’s best and worst in the nation. Inspired more his own late-blooming infatuation with America’s pastime than by the demigodliness of Yankee Derek Jeter or the coming-out tale of baseball’s Billy Bean, the play captures the exhilarating way in which sport (one of few enterprises in which "people of color are routinely adulated by people of pallor") can catch us up and trip us up, its highs and lows approximating the exaltation and the crashes of Greek tragedy. And Paul Daigneault’s production for SpeakEasy and BTW, if it doesn’t have the giddy swirl and Yankee Stadium shadow of Joe Montello’s 2002 staging for London’s Donmar Warehouse and New York’s Public Theatre (it transferred to Broadway in 2003), gets the job done smartly while fielding several standout performances.

The tale is told, with an emphasis on its inexorability, by Empires (read Yankees, right down to the pinstripes) shortstop Kippy Sunderstrom (played with deadpan intelligence by Nathaniel McIntyre), whom Greenberg fashions as an ironist and an "intellectual." The play’s events emanate, Kippy opines, from best pal Lemming’s revelation — made simply because it could be, or so the confident superstar thought, without putting a dent in either his image or his team’s dynamic, and because he had been encouraged by a pontificating childhood friend and fellow all-star to manifest his "true nature." It turns out coming out of the closet was not what the Bible Belt batter had in mind.

Much of the play takes place in the Empires’ locker room, which comes complete with working showers whose drains, in Eric Levenson’s blue-sky-and-green-field-invoking set, are exposed by folding back a wedge of floor. Eight of the play’s 11 characters (including two Latino ballplayers and the Japanese pitcher who has no English, preferring to Americanize by making his mind "a prairie") do time under the jets, managing to act while naked and wet. Outside, the clothed world is the oyster of Neil A. Casey’s goofily blossoming Mason Marzac, the playwright’s wish-fulfilling mouthpiece in the form of Lemming’s new money manager, who in order to relate better to his famous client sets out to learn baseball and falls hopelessly, haplessly, under its spell, finding both community and "the first crowd I had ever agreed with."

The friendship between the effeminate financial adviser and the aloof sports star, both outsiders though one feels above and the other beneath his peers, is unlikely. But the character of ball-besotted Mason is a delight, his euphoria captured here with frisky sincerity by Neil A. Casey. Also arresting is newcomer Christopher Brophy as the redneck Shane Mungitt — though Brophy’s reliever is an unschooled, overwhelmed brute lacking the perverse innocence Frederick Weller brought to the role on Broadway. At the center of the production, of course, is Ricardo Walker’s smoldering, athletic Lemming, who could use a bit more charisma.

He might try picking the pockets of Todd Alan Johnson. Stanislavsky said there are no small actors, only small parts, and Johnson, walking off with the New Repertory Theatre’s Into the Woods (through May 29), shows what a skillfully large actor can do with a couple of small parts. Playing the vengeful barber in New Rep’s fine chamber staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, Johnson showed he can tear a melodramatic passion to tatters and wrap his chops around a difficult score. Here he does it again while, as the libidinously Jack Nicholsonian Wolf, also getting his chops around the bristling corpus of Veronica J. Kuehn’s amusingly revved-up Red Riding Hood. Then as Cinderella’s Prince, a wolf in hero’s clothing, turning on the smarmy charm while leaping o’er tree trunks, he turns around and steals the show from himself.

Not that the rest of the production is easy booty for a thespian bandit. Rick Lombardo’s revival of the Tony-winning (for score and book) 1987 Sondheim/James Lapine Freudian fairy tale gone wrong crowds the tiny New Rep stage (the troupe moves next fall to larger, spanking-new quarters at the Arsenal Center for the Arts), and the set design by Peter Colao — vertical tomes that open into storybook scenes — is prosaic. (You can forget about "steps of the palace" for Cinderella to sprawl upon.) But it’s hard not to be lured into the Bettelheimian copse of sexual and existential danger into which Sondheim and Lapine enfold kid lit. And the likable New Rep cast manages the twist between the musical’s cartoon first act, which takes the characters of overlapping fairy tales to the brink of happily-ever-after, and its poignant second, which introduces disillusion, death, and community forged by sorrow, all before bouncing back into the infectious title tune.

Sondheim’s score, as clever as the show itself, mixes saucy pulsing, complex dissonance, and haunting melody ("No One Is Alone," "Children Will Listen"). But for all the fun that laces through it, it’s damn difficult to sing. Under the musical direction of Todd C. Gordon and associate Steven Bergman (who conducted opening night), the performers — standing in for iconic personae from Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, and Little Red Riding Hood, along with an added baker and his wife with infertility problems — handle it to varying degrees of perfection. When the mix of storybook emotion and pitch-perfect warbling is on — as in the two "Agony" duets by Johnson and Andrew Giordano or Leigh Barrett’s performance as the baker’s wife (especially following a giddy, troubling quickie in the woods) — the result, whether satiric or heartfelt, is buoyant. Some of Sondheim veteran Nancy E. Carroll’s singing, as the Witch brought to sorrow when she sheds her nasal prosthesis, is satisfying, bristling with enunciation and shaded by subtle vibrato. At other times, her sound is grating. And her baby-snatching enchantress has little dimension beyond tough and depressed. Throw in a little Glinda; children will listen.