Sport vs. theater: "Chad Deity' and "Grace'

John Lahr, the New Yorker's long time drama critic, once argued that the theater's natural competition is sport. Both genres are live performing events, competing for audiences, advertisers, and even (as the recent furor over Pennsylvania's proposed "arts tax" proved) for tax exemptions and government subsidies.

But sport achieves success in ways that theater can only envy. Les Misérables, Broadway's most widely attended show, has been performed some 39,500 times, to a total global audience of 51 million, since it opened in 1985. But in the National Football League alone, nearly 20 million people attend live games each season.

The publicists must beg

In terms of creating and engaging a community, sport continues to trounce theater. Walk into any bar in Philadelphia, and you'll see TV sets tuned to ESPN and the NFL network, channels that devote entire segments (if not entire shows) simply to fan-centered fantasy leagues. Hundreds of daily callers plague radio airways to argue the minutiae of a single substitution or trade.

By contrast, publicists at Philadelphia's major theaters must beg for feature articles in the local papers. And when's the last time you heard someone arguing about which Philly actor could play the best Hamlet? (I pick Sarah Sanford.)

Unlike theater and most arts, America weaves sports into its public life in ways that justify funding new stadiums while gutting subsidies to the arts. If a home team wins a championship (go Phils!), the city throws a parade. Some towns name streets or entire commercial districts after legendary players such as Brett Favre. The last time Philadelphia mounted a statue to an actor, it was for Rocky Balboa— a character in a boxing movie.

Putting on a game face

Yet sport achieves its success in part by relying on theatrical tricks. Athletes put on a game-face and don costumes to become characters; they engage in ritual and create spectacle; and over a measured sequence of time and space, they battle for a goal that only one side or player can attain.

Football's end zone dances and the choreographed grace and beauty of figure skating both include elements of theatricality, but theater rarely returns the favor sufficiently to represent this most pervasive element of modern American life.

To be sure, there are exceptions, like Jason Miller's That Championship Season (about the reunion of former high school basketball players and their coach), or Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg's locker-room look at Major League Baseball. The male protagonists of August Wilson's Fences and Tennessee Williams's Cat On a Hot Tin Roof are, respectively, a washed-up baseball player and a washed-up football star. (For a few lesser-known British examples, peruse a 2008 roundup of "Smash Plays About Sport" published in London's Independent.)

But these plays use athletics only tangentially as a vehicle to explore other issues or comment on the larger culture.

A mountain on stage

By contrast, both The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, by Kristoffer Diaz, and Grace, or the Art of Climbing, by Lauren Feldman, actually portray their respective sports: professional wrestling and mountain climbing. Interact Theatre Company constructed a wrestling ring, and Nice People Theatre Company draped a pair of trusses across and drilled climbing holds into the walls of a warehouse for their actors to scale and maneuver around. These feats of stage engineering enable both productions to latch onto the athletically driven spectacle and action that sport offers, something that by itself might attract non-traditional (i.e., young and marginally educated) audiences.

Of course, even with the spectacle of sport, both productions must still to rely on the drama of the script to succeed. But if successful, both could— by attracting new audiences— easily turn into commercial successes.

Bruce Graham's mainstream appeal

Theatre Exile proved this theory last year with Bruce Graham's The Philly Fan, a play that has since sold out houses at several theaters while attracting notice in Sports Illustrated, ESPN and the New York Times. Exile's managing director, Bryan Clark, told me that his psychologically oriented company owes its financial success to Graham's more mainstream/middlebrow play.

Clearly, sport sells. But of course a sudden influx of plays about America's sports obsession won't by itself solve theater's economic and sociological problems, like timid marketing, graying audiences and marginalization in the public consciousness. But the theater's use of sport as a vehicle to explore other issues— as both Interact and Nice People do in their current productions— could help erase the popular notion of theater as merely a refuge for the elite. If the theater refuses to acknowledge sport, how can anyone argue that theater still bears relevance to American life?♦


To read a response by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another response, click here.
To read a review of Chad Deity by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read Jim Rutter's review of Grace, click here.