Playwrights’ hoop dreams are flying to Broadway this summer
In Inua Ellams’ new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous basketball games in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’ “Flex,” high school students practice their defensive stances as they pass by in rural Arkansas. Towards the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one basketball game with a crumpled piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of NBA star LeBron James.
Basketball hasn’t just been on New York City’s playgrounds this summer. Hoop dreams also play out on stage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.
While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are NBA players.)
“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The demigod of the rain.” “It’s like an embodied conflict. It is performed by highly skilled performers. When you watch Broadway, you feel like you’re watching NBA performers.”
For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally significant sport, in part because so many international stars play in the NBA, such as Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is from Greece.
“It draws from every spot on the planet, meaning the sport has become a very important athletic pursuit worldwide” said Joseph, whose play “King James” was just finishing its run at New York City Center.
And basketball’s prevalence in pop culture—including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television—has made its way into the theater space as well. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the NBA in 2019, was one of the producers of the Broadway shows ‘American Son’ and ‘Ain’t No Mo’.
“Even if someone hasn’t played on a team or played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” said Jones, who wrote “Flex,” in a recent interview. “You go in any neighborhood or small town. Someone made a basketball goal.”
When casting “Flex”, which is in previews at the Lincoln Center TheaterAt the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball played on stage to look authentic.
“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” said Blain-Cruz. “We care about the individual in the role they play and how they play it. And I think that ties into theater.
Set in rural Arkansas, Jones’ play tells the story of a girls’ high school basketball team in 1998, which corresponded to the sophomore year of the WNBA. So as the audition process progressed, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot, and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: the cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.
“There’s a sort of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said of the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together they make the event.”
A few minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warmup with the cast, including hip openers and arm raises. It could have doubled as pregame prep. There was a basketball hoop at the back of the set and a basketball court was painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of game that basketball teams perform, and the staged work features several examples of gameplay.
“There is a real rigor. It’s real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sport on the podium. There’s something honest about it, right? Dribbling with the ball is actually dribbling with the ball. We are not carrying out the idea of dribbling the ball.
After a recent outing to a Liberty game in New York, actress Erica Matthews, whose character Starra Jones is the fictional team’s 17-year-old point guard, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.
“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience surrounds them, the way they’re cheering, it’s actually storytelling.”
Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Demigod of Rain,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the NBA is in previews and scheduled to open on July 31. While ‘Flex’ deals with down-to-earth issues such as teenage pregnancy, ‘The Half-God of Rainfall’ transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to interact with.
At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimized slow motion basketball moves at the behest of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. Actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked to set up a good screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation – complete with tongue wagging. (Jordan is mentioned in the piece.)
As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, watched from desks full of small inflatable basketballs, they worked to remap lines as the choreography required. While this version of Ellams’ poem has a cast of seven, he said it could be performed with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production op the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England only had two actors.)
Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character of Demi to “do all the things I could never do” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater stage appeal because it is “a much nicer sport”.
“There’s something humble and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back to your palm. That can break you. This is solitude, inviting the blues and what it means to play the blues. There is a desire.”
“There’s a natural melancholy to it,” he added, which makes it “easier to combine with the human spirit.”
Of course, there have been other basketball-related games. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between 1980s Broadway basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 play ‘The Great Leap’, also directed by Magar, tells the story of a basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between university teams from Beijing and San Francisco.
Daryl Morey, now an executive with the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan – not the Jordan – as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.
“I think basketball is just the most important of all sports among the emerging directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve talked to,” Morey said.
Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play“Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, enjoyed a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.
Also football and boxing: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, hit Broadway in 2010, and in 2014, a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famed 1976 underdog boxing film, brought to Broadway.
But right now, basketball is experiencing a renaissance in the theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights taking on the sport are hot right now.