Jason Miller knew about locker rooms, about athletes and about coaches, and his 1972 play, "That Championship Season," is one of the best depictions of the all-male (at that time) environment which eventually destroys the ephemeral charms represented by a trophy or two and a lot of praise. A good production, but one not without flaws, opened last night under the auspices of Dramatic License Productions in its Chesterfield Mall space, to run through Aug.22.
With Alan Knoll making his local directorial debut in fine style, and a cast of five–Charlie Barron, Kevin Beyer, R. Travis Estes, Cameron Ulrich and B. Weller–contributing solid and nicely complementary performances, it's highly entertaining despite barbed, vulgar remarks about race and religion that bring a large number of winces.
But for reasons that I cannot fathom, the company used a script from a 1999 television movie, a fact that was a grave insult to the playwright's memory, instead of the original 1972 version which ran almost 1000 performances on Broadway and won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize. Updating the action brought almost-audible gasps from people like me, who saw only the original version, when we heard a reference to George Clooney, saw cell phones, screw-off beer-bottle caps and a number of other untimely references.
Almost ironically, director Alan Knoll, in a program note, pointed out that the 1974 production at the American (I saw it, too, and reviewed it) had "mesmerized" him and led him to a life in the theater.
On Courtney Sanazaro's delightful set, representing the Coach's home in a middle-sized Pennsylvania city, with pictures of Theodore Roosevelt, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and John F. Kennedy on the walls, references to Father Charles Coughlin and other right-wing, bigoted heroes, four players gather for a reunion. Sanazaro, credited with building the set from her own design, even escapes the wrath of the theater gods for violating the Chekhovian theorem that a gun on stage at the beginning of a play must be fired before the final curtain.
All the basketball players had father-identification problems and grew up under Jesuitical education, but their personalities were molded by Coach (Beyer in a powerful portrayal), a man in the Fascistic, might-makes-right, winning-is-the-only-thing tradition of Bobby Knight and Rick Pitino. The players are George Sikowski (Estes, who parlayed an insurance salesman's skills into a job as the mayor), brothers Tom (Barron) and James (Weller) Daley, the former a hard-drinking, unsuccessful novelist, the latter a principal of a junior high school who wants to be mayor, and Phil Romano (Ulrich), who uses campaign contributions to enrich himself and to create power, and who happens to be having an affair with the wife of a teammate.
The surnames show the geographical background. Coach doesn't have any other name, like a number of Coaches I have known whose lives were entwined with that five-letter word.
The cast is brilliantly balanced. Estes' depiction of an insecure man whose desire for popularity is reminiscent of Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman." He's terrific; you can practically feel his fear. Weller, who has accepted responsibility all his life and has become an errand boy, is moving, as is Barron, drowning in his Scotch bottle and, when he gets a chance to stand up on his own, discovers he's tied his shoelaces together. Ulrich, tan and smooth and demanding the material gifts that his father never found while he built the successful business, reeks of confidence, lathered on as if it were so much after-shave lotion.
"That Championship Season" is an excellent play, showing the shallowness of the world of athletics and athletes, given an absurd sense of entitlement by Coach and all his copies.
But I still wish Dramatic License Productions had not taken its name so literally.
"That Championship Season," by Dramatic License Productions at Chesterfield Mall through Aug. 22
–Joe