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| Michael McGuire, Richard A. Dysart, Paul Sorvino, Charles Durning, Walter McGinn. (Photos: Friedman-Abeles.) |
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| Richard A. Dysart, Walter McGinn. |
Few plays of the 70s
were accorded the tumultuously ecstatic panegyrics engendered by Jason Miller’s
smash, That Championship Season. It
represented a triumph of immense stature for the author, designers, director,
actors, and producer Joseph Papp. His success with this and several other works
of the period, most notably A Chorus Line,
skyrocketed him and his New York Shakespeare Festival to the pinnacle of
American theatre. When he transferred this overwhelmingly popular play from Off-
to on-Broadway, where it opened the 1972-1973 season, it became his third such
transfer in little more than a year.
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| Paul Sorvino, Walter McGinn, Michael McGuire. |
That Championship Season recounts the events of a 20th-nniversary
reunion held by a team of small-town Pennsylvania men, alumni of a Catholic
high school, whose basketball team captured the state championship in 1952. Present
are five of the men, four players and their aging coach (mortally ill with
cancer). The only one not there is their star forward, nor has he attended any
of their earlier, periodic gatherings.
The reunion is held
in the large, rambling, turn-of-the-century home of the coach (Richard A.
Dysart), a locale represented by a fascinatingly solid-looking, detailed, and cleverly
laid out Santo Loquasto setting. As the work progresses, Miller lays bare the
bigotries, animosities, vices, and corruptions of each character. The
ostensible purpose underlying the reunion is to unite the old team for one more
try at validating the “winning is everything” ethic that has so long sustained
the men, and that we learn was responsible for that championship season when the
final victory was achieved through foul means instigated by the coach. It is
the missing player, Martin, in fact, who followed the coach’s instructions to
play dirty and whose life has ever after been tainted with guilt and
self-recrimination.
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| Charles Durning, Michael McGuire. |
In the present
instance, the victory aimed for is the re-election of team member George
Sikowski (Charles Durning) to his job as town mayor. But playwright Miller soon
reveals that Sikowski is an inept, fatuous blowhard and that his old teammates
are each, in their own ways, defeated, deflated, and decaying specimens of a
rotting value system that has been poisoning them for years. Many of their
pretensions and blind spots are continuously being punctured by the verbal
darts thrown at them by the alcoholic Tom Daley (Walter McGinn), whose cynical
tongue, loosened by drink, permits him to be a sort of author’s mouthpiece. The
metaphorical significance of the action is vividly imaged when Sikowski vomits
into the large silver trophy that dominates the upstage area.
Painfully accurate in
its depiction of the five men, larded with profanity and gut-shaking laughter,
and buttressed by an intensely meaningful thematic substructure, That Championship Season was a slam dunk
for many critics. “It has vigor, its dialogue is salty and its unmasking of the
contradiction between mask and face, myth and reality is heightened, to speak
in the play’s vein, by a ‘no bullshit’ forthrightness,” wrote Harold Clurman. “It
is the dramatist’s understanding of his characters, and therefore his sympathy
for them, that gives his play such richness,” observed Edith Oliver. “[A]s a
well-made, commercial, traditional yet freshly felt and thought-out play, it is
perfect. . . . I was amused, delighted, horrified and captivated,” applauded
the more usually acerbic John Simon.
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| Michael McGuire, Paul Sorvino, Charles Durning. |
A.J. Antoon’s staging
was outstanding, “not merely in organizing a brilliant ensemble of actors and
giving the play a headlong vitality, but in underlaying an essentially
straightforward play with a bed of metaphor and mysticism,” declared Martin
Gottfried. So well-integrated and thrilling were the performances of McGinn,
Durning, Dysart, Michael McGuire, Paul Sorvino, that they were honored by an award memorializing the quality of the ensemble.
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| Richard A. Dysart, Walter McGinn. |
The play won the New
York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Tony; Miller won
awards from the Outer Critics Circle, the Drama Desk, and Variety; the ensemble was honored by Variety; Sorvino won Variety’s
Supporting Actor poll and received a Tony nomination; Antoon landed a Drama
Desk Award, a Variety Poll award, and
a Tony; Loquasto was another Variety Poll
winner, while also receiving a Tony nomination; and lighting designer Ian
Calderon also received a Tony nomination.
