Director Ed Bishop made two key decisions for his revival of the 1973 Pulitzer Prize winning drama "That Championship Season," which opened last weekend at Theater Two in Arlington's Gunston Arts Center.
One of those decisions worked nicely. One didn't.
The play is, in the words of the American Century Theater's Artistic Director Jack Marshall, a five-character "guy drama." It took Broadway by storm in the year that Watergate, Vietnam, the Yom Kippur War, SALT and the OPEC's gas crisis had turned the world upside down. It was perfectly attuned to America's mood of looking back on a supposedly better past and wondering just what went wrong.
Author Jason Miller not only won the Pulitzer for the play, he walked away with a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for most promising playwright. However, it was his one and only real hit on the stage.
It drew on his own youth in the Lackawanna Valley of Pennsylvania, although the high school basketball team he played on didn't win the state championship like the one in the play did.
The story focuses on what happened to the members of a high school team in the 20 years following their upset victory in the 1952 championship game. Gathered in the coach's home for a reunion, they reveal their disappointments and even their concerns that their victorious season wasn't completely without its failures.
THE FIRST, and by far most successful, decision that Bishop made was to shift the locale from Pennsylvania to Alabama and make it an all-black team from an all-black high school. This piece of non-traditional casting changes the story from being about small town white Pennsylvania to a more all-inclusive sense of being about America and the American Dream. Rather than do damage to the piece, the switch actually broadens its appeal and deepens its importance.
The second decision, however, is one that doesn't work nearly so well. One thing every director must decide for every production is the energy level at which he wants his actors to operate. Too low a level and the piece becomes dull and ineffective. Too high a level and there's no room for variation.
Here, Bishop starts his cast off nearly screaming at each other during the chit-chat conversations in the early moments of their reunion. Later, when passions erupt and tempers flare, there is little difference in either volume or emotion.
Morgan James Hall is the principal victim of this decision. He plays the mayor of the town, and much of the introductory material is his to deliver. Nearly shouting some throw-away lines and obviously pushing emotions where none need exist, he comes across as too theatrical.
ELLIOTT MOFFITT is the coach whose own life peaked in the final 10 seconds of the championship game, just as those of his players did. He's bitter and carries prejudices, fears and hatreds from longer back than the younger men.
Some of his speeches are written as being reminiscent of the locker room pep talks he delivered to his team those two decades ago. Others are written as calmer, and quieter efforts at gentle persuasion. Unfortunately, given the shouting level of his early scenes, the two modes merge, leaving little to distinguish between them.
Joseph A. Mills III plays a former star who is now nearly homeless as a wandering alcoholic. He creates a real sense of contrast, taking the emotion way down as he communicates his sense of not really belonging to the group anymore. What is more, the more he drinks, the quieter he gets. His is the most enjoyable performance of the play.
Ron Lincoln delivers a fairly smooth performance as a team member who has risen to be the principal of the local junior high school - a position far below his own expectations for himself - and Omar A. Bah rounds out the cast with a nicely developed portrayal of a businessman who has violated the
trust his former teammates seem to think he owes them.
Brad Hathaway reviews theater in Virginia, Washington and Maryland as well as Broadway, and edits Potomac Stages, a Web site covering theater in the region (www.PotomacStages.com). He can be reached at Brad@PotomacStages.com.