The darker side of sports
Take a moment during basketball’s March Madness to consider a dissenting view about the uplifting power of sports on the American male character.
This production of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning play, “That Championship Season,” is a harrowing, furiously paced, bleakly comic demolition of the Cult of the Coach. A solid ensemble cast, well-drilled by director Wes Deitrick, delivers a mesmerizing combination of black comedy and psychodrama. When you walk out of this one, you may feel like you’ve played four brutal quarters in a high-tension game, and I mean that as a compliment.
The play begins as a simple 20th reunion of a 1952 high school basketball championship team – four players and their gritty old coach. There’s good-natured banter, beery camaraderie and sweet nostalgia.
Yeah, right. That lasts about five minutes. The play soon reveals its true and far more subversive intentions. Playwright Jason Miller is dedicated to demolishing every cliché about how sports “builds character” and coaches are benign “father figures.”
Before this play races to its conclusion, these teammates-for-life have (metaphorically) stabbed each other in the back and (literally) held each other at shotgun-point. And if the play’s theme isn’t clear enough, one of them ends up vomiting drunkenly into the championship cup.
Deitrick imbues the proceedings with a terrific, high-testosterone David Mamet kind of profane energy. He has these five sad and dangerous men drinking Crown Royal non-stop. As the second act proceeds, it’s not only the alcoholic character (Tom) who gets blotto. All five lurch unsteadily through Peter Hardie’s living-room set, becoming increasingly drunk and increasingly mean.
This is a true ensemble cast, each playing skillfully off of the other. Terry Sticka is the tough, crew-cut coach; David Gigler is George, the small-town politician; Brad Picard is Phil, the rich mining magnate; Tracy Schornick is James, the ever-responsible junior high principal; and Dave Rideout is the alcoholic but clear-eyed Tom.
As on a lot of good teams, this cast has no dominating star but also no weak spot. I must single out Sticka for making the coach into a frightening bulldog of a bigot; and Gigler for so artfully communicating George’s frightening rage.
Deitrick knit this cast together tightly and gave them the gumption to, as a coach might say, attack without letup.
This play was probably more shocking in 1972 when the cult of the martinet coach was in flower. Modern audiences may not be quite so surprised to find that a coach’s “character-building” might involve bullying, bigotry and a vicious creed of all-out warfare.
Still, this is no period piece. Young athletes are still being molded by all-powerful coaches – and not always molded for the better.