By Mike Fischer for Forward Theater Company
“Why do we do this?,” Shawn asks his friend Matt, early in Rajiv Joseph’s King James, being staged by Forward Theater at the Overture Center from September 12-29.
Shawn is referring to the friends’ passionate devotion to Cleveland’s sports teams and, specifically, the frequently hapless Cleveland Cavaliers. “Why do we care so much,” Shawn continues, about “sports,” wasting “time and money and emotional well-being on a bunch of sports athletes?”
“I don’t have to do this,” he declares. “I don’t have to be this person.”
It’s July 2010. Sitting in a bar long after closing, the two dejected friends and lifelong Clevelanders are absorbing the news that the great LeBron James is leaving the Cavs and his native Ohio for Miami. “When you live in Cleveland,” Matt wryly notes, “the grass really is always greener” somewhere else. Joseph would know; he himself is a long-suffering Cavs fan from Cleveland.
“In this country’s long love affair with professional sports,” the legendary Roger Angell wrote in his great essay “Three for the Tigers” (1973), “the athlete has more and more come to resemble the inamorata – an object of unceasing scrutiny, rapturous adoration, and expensive adornment – while the suitor, or fan, remains forever loyal, shabby, and unknown.” Those fans’ “record of attachment and service to their game and their club often exceeds that of any player.”
But why? Why do Matt and Shawn persist?
The title of Angell’s essay gives the game away: It’s not about one man, but three – native Detroiters and friends for life because their passionate devotion to the Detroit Tigers provides the glue allowing them to talk with and be together, even after one of them has moved to Chicago.
It’s “the basis of our entire friendship,” Shawn points out, in explaining why he and Matt carry on with the Cavs. “What else do we ever talk about?!,” Matt later agrees.
The Ties That Bind
As King James makes clear, Matt and Shawn actually talk about a lot that has nothing to do with the religion of LeBron, any more than Protestant Christianity can be reduced to the first King James and his bible.
As they suffer through the highs and lows of successive basketball seasons, Matt and Shawn will channel the inferiority complex that all of us living in so-called flyover country experience. They’ll wrestle with the intersection of race and class (Matt is white; Shawn is Black). They’ll think about the meaning of success – and what we owe to our given and chosen families and communities, in an era when we’re all continually exhorted to take care of #1. They’ll track the rise of personal phones and social media, wondering whether virtual reality is eroding actual life.
Finally, they’ll dissect the “problem of America” in terms of the “way people talk” to each other – and don’t.
“Is it OK to talk to people around you?,” Shawn asks, before attending his first Cavs game. “I like to talk about the game with people.”
“At the very least,” Angell writes of his three Tigers fans, “these gentle prodigals have used their sport to connect themselves to their fathers and to their boyhood and to their city – the inner city they long since lost and left – and also to connect themselves to friends with whom they could share a passion, a special language, and an immense private history. Baseball has been a family to them.”
Sport, in this context, functions like theater, binding strangers together and offering us a language through which we might mediate our differences, talk to each other, and move forward together. Both are exercises in make-believe through which an ostensible escape from the real world offers us a way of imagining ourselves more deeply into its possibilities.
Community Theater
“All sport,” longtime Guardian theater critic Michael Billington once observed, “is a form of drama. It can also produce the most amazing, cathartic experiences.”
A sporting pavilion has all the trappings of a theatrical production: dramatic lighting and sound effects, colorful costumes, and often gorgeous choreography, executed by performers for a community of watchers bound together as they watch. Both disciplines require seemingly endless practice and rehearsal, selfless collaboration and teamwork, and courageous high-level performance under extraordinary pressure; each pursues a dramatic arc involving triumph, defeat, and resilience.
Crucially, both also involve connection and interaction with an audience, inspiring its members to write their own stories of how we might imagine ourselves as a community by reminding us of all we share, despite our many differences. It’s no accident that the spectacular opening ceremony at this year’s Olympics in Paris celebrated artists and athletes alike – as well as all those watching and making sense of their own shared cultural narrative through the stories being shared with them.
Befitting the currently fraught and fractious moment in the American story, each of Forward’s four plays this year will focus on how we might collaboratively create stories that reflect all of us, celebrating our differences while nevertheless emphasizing what we have in common.
It’s no accident that three of those four – including King James – feature just two onstage actors, the better to break down and hopefully reconstruct the lost art of conversation that constitutes the indispensable bedrock on which any community must build its imagined future and make its dreams come true.
As you’ll see, Matt and Shawn are very different people. It would be easy – and, in 2024, both expected and predictable – to focus on their differences in assessing what’s wrong with America.
King James doesn’t ignore those differences. But as with every Forward play this season, it also modestly proposes that were we to spend more time exploring and emphasizing all we have in common, we might rediscover the joy of how much more we could be if we stand side by side together, fervidly rooting for the home team and maybe – just maybe – coming home to ourselves.
For more information regarding and tickets to King James, visit https://forwardtheater.com/show/king-james/.
