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The Problem with Loving Sports and Theater

Essay by

March Madness was wrecked for me again this year. I had theatre commitments throughout the whole damn thing. I found out about the big games and big upsets by guiltily checking texts, Facebook, and ESPN Gamecast in a dark theatre. My life in the theatre is like a Charles Ives symphony: the show starts at 8 p.m., tip-off/first-pitch/kick-off is at 8:07 p.m.—the collision of the two creates a tense, painful, wonderful celebration of the ephemeral.

In an age where so much can be recorded and on-demand, theatre is an antidote to spending our day looking at a screen, to watching YouTube videos and television shows anytime we want. Part of the beauty of theatre is that it is fleeting. We come together with a group of people—at a specific time for a limited run—to see a story as a community, to hear questions worth asking. It doesn’t last, you have to catch it while you can, you can’t do it by yourself. It’s all wonderful—except when the big game is on at the same damn time.

Male Basketball team
UConn Huskies Men's Basketball team celebrating their NCAA championship win in 2014.
Photo by rantsports.com. 

The Suspense
So just DVR the game, turn off your phone, and tell people not to tell you, right? This never works. Someone always spoils it. (And also, who can afford cable and a DVR on a theatre salary?) A big game demands to be seen in real-time. Sports make us wonder—something theatre can learn from. We wonder: what is going to happen next? Who is going to win? It could be the biggest game of the year, people could have spent fortunes on the tickets, but as soon as it’s clear which team will come out on top, the wonder is over and folks start heading for the exits. Try watching a recorded game when you already know who wins. It’s pointless. The magic of sports, for me, is that anything can happen: “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” But if it’s already over, anything can’t happen, it’s already happened even when I don’t know what happened.

We need people to be dying to know what happens next. That keeps butts in the seats. That gets people to come back to the theatre again.

Womens basketball team
UConn Huskies Women's Basketball team celebrating their NCAA championship win in 2014.
Photo by Getty Images. 

How many new plays, at the intermission, are you dying to know what happens next? (Well, many new plays don’t have an intermission, but that’s a conversation for another time.) Too often, new plays forego suspenseful plot in the name of character development or poetic language or some unnamable subconscious inspiration. We need people to be dying to know what happens next. That keeps butts in the seats. That gets people to come back to the theatre again. At the end of each scene of Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, I found myself saying, “Holy shit. I can’t believe that just happened. What is going to happen next?”  We need bold, unsafe, untethered storytelling like that—as back and forth and exciting as this year’s Michigan-Kentucky Elite Eight game.

An obvious way to capture the immediacy of sports is to put sports onstage. Half of my play Samuel J. and K. takes places on a basketball court with two brothers playing a game of 21. There are times when they have to make it, times when they have to miss it, and contingency plans for each. It automatically created a buzz of excitement in the audience—and a healthy dose of genuine competiveness between the actors that helped tell the story. More often than not, we want the action onstage to feel like it’s happening for the first time. Making or missing a shot demands that presence. It is inherently unpredictable. Of course, we can’t have basketball in every play, but how can we harness a similar dramatic immediacy for the actions and choices of our characters?

The Magic
Then why do people still come to see Hamlet or Othello? Everyone knows how it ends. It’s the same reason the ESPN Classic channel exists. There are plays, there are games that transcend the “what is going to happen next” question. The how and why are so compelling, it keeps us glued to our seats. These are the classics. I could watch replays of the Illinois-Arizona game from the 2005 NCAA Tournament over and over. Illinois was down 15 points with just under 4 minutes left. Down 8 points with 58 seconds left. I watch it and I still don’t understand how the Illini did it. If Othello is done well, it is mesmerizing, you can’t breathe, you keep hoping Othello will stop letting Iago poison his mind, you keep wishing Desdemona will live—there is an urgency even though you know what happens—because what happens is miraculous.

To those of you I have offended by comparing the Illinois comeback against Arizona in 2005 to a Shakespeare masterpiece, I apologize. I wish I didn’t care this much about sports. It’s a colossal waste of time, energy, and money. I’ve been brainwashed by the media, by advertising, by American culture to live and breathe and love sports. Cubs, Bulls, Bears—anytime, all the time—but also, March Madness, the Olympics, the World Cup, the Australian Open—anything can pull me in. A good friend of mine loves Ole Miss football—before I knew it, I was at the same bar in NYC as Archie Manning watching Ole Miss beat Texas. Excellence, passion, great stories—any sport can pull me in—even curling. Why? Because there is something contagiously compelling about the forum, the coliseum, the field, the rink, the stage—where shit is going down tonight. How can we bring that fervor to the theatre? What play is as good as an epic duel between Federer and Nadal? Machinal, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Topdog/Underdog perhaps?

When Taj Gibson posterized Dwayne Wade with a massive dunk late in the game, I thought the United Center was going to explode.

The Spectacle
But there are other ways to compel an audience than an epic showdown between two dueling forces. Sometimes we love a game or a show that gives us what we want with little or no drama. Jukebox musicals, The Lion King—we love the spectacle of it. Story and suspense take a backseat to singing, dancing, design, or the lyricism of the language. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I was lucky enough to be at Game One of the 2011 Eastern Conference Finals. Da Bulls beat the Heat by 21 and no one left early. When Taj Gibson posterized Dwayne Wade with a massive dunk late in the game, I thought the United Center was going to explode. Sometimes we love a blowout, sometimes we just want to be entertained and not worry about what’s going to happen next. (The rest of the series was no drama, but in the opposite

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Thoughts from the curator

A series focusing on the overlaps between sports and theatre.

Sports in Theatre

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Beautiful, Mat! I eagerly await more new plays that make want to pause the action, call everyone into the room, and watch it again on replay.

Also, go A's.

I really think your analysis of theatre and sports as kindred spirits to be really spot on. They both stem from the human desire to craft experiences for themselves. What can we learn as creators of live events from other fields dealing with the creation of experiences? Things like sports, religious service, concerts, and even the rising field of live marketing (there are so many more examples).

The popularity of different experiences-events ebb and flow as the make-up and wants of the public changes. What can we learn from other experience-creators about what the public needs today? And what can we do to make theater fulfill it. You seem to call for an immediacy and wonder that sports compels in us. I think you are right.

All this makes me want to dig out my copy of "The Empty Space". I'm sure Peter Brooks might have something of had something to say about this conversation.

Loved this piece, Mat. I've often thought about the parallels and differences between sports and theatre and have had thoughts about writing a basketball play. Would love to see the one you've written. (How can I get a copy?)

"Performance is always about life or death, whether it is sports or theater." ~Caridad Svich. One of all-time favorite theater quotes.

Sports of all kind is a form of improvisational theatre, with roles determined by specific athletic goals. It still embodies human desire, will, and morality, sometimes at the basest or highest levels. I, too, hated to miss some of this intense, ephemeral theatre for the sake of my commitments to that other theatre. I had to weigh which I love more, and the more cerebral, pre-structured form won out easily. Still, I watched many replays of highlights from Connecticut vs. Florida.

One thing that amazed me at the time--and makes perfect sense in retrospect--was watching sporting events more than once. When I was growing up, my father was (and still is) an auto racing fan, but he often had business trips that called for travel on Sundays. After we had a VCR, he'd set up to record races that he'd miss. Of course, back then, that meant you couldn't watch anything else on that TV during the recording. Once in a while, I'd watch the races anyway, then maybe watch along with him when he came home. Sometimes, if the race wasn't very exciting, the replay was even less so. But every now and then, there'd be a fantastic race--at one point, aging racer Harry Gant had a five race winning streak late in his career, and those races were thrilling to watch, especially the one where he wound up dozens of laps behind and still won to continue the streak. I think my dad still has that VHS tape.

That's why we go back to Hamlet time and again. We want to see how he comes from behind, we want to see how he winds up winning or losing, even when we know the answer. It's not so much the answer but the process, the journey, the how of it that grabs us. Any ten people can get on a court and play basketball, we want to see how these ten do it. Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are delightful to watch in Sherlock, and now they're both going to do Richard III--I'd love to see how they each do it, and I'm not even all that much of a Richard III fan...