Losing the Championship

JASON MILLER's That Championship Season aced the competition on Broadway last year, finishing up with the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the New York Drama Critics' Award, and the Tony. Unfortunately, the cast of the touring company playing now in Boston can't do justice to the brilliant tragi-comedy of Miller's play. The tense moments of the play slip by with long pauses that are more tedious than suspenseful and the intensity of the actors' emotional outbursts is rarely in keeping with the dramatic mood that has been created on the stage. Working together, the five actors fail to create that subtly woven web of tension and humor, love and hate, that should have riveted our attention to the action. The play lags because the interaction between characters seems so devoid of the intensity of feeling that Miller wanted to create.

The drama records the 20th reunion of the 1954 Pennsylvania State High School Basketball Champions. Four of the players gather in their coach's living room to relive the glory of their come-from-behind win, to drink a few beers, to swap locker room jokes. The high school heroes, grown men now, still refer to their host as "Coach" with the kind of nameless deference that is usually reserved for a parent. They look at him as the symbol of old times, as an exemplar of moral and physical strength.

Where are the basketball wonder boys now? Three of the four old players still live in the small town where they grew up. One is the mayor, a corrupt, old-time politician. Another is his campaign manager, a junior high school principal of self-acknowledged mediocrity. And then there is the big financer of the mayor's campaign, a strip-miner, protected by His Honor from the angry cries of eco-freaks. All three men sport a veneer of small town success. The fourth member of the group has left the town where he grew up, just as he has left ten other towns. He is a bum; "I'm in the travel business," he says. Slouched in a chair with a glass in his hand, he tosses off witticisms and drinks with remarkable speed.

After a few dirty jokes, some self-congratulatory reminiscences, and more than a couple of drinks, the reunion camaraderie begins to turn sour. First the boys turn against one another, and then they each turn inward and confess their own failures. Here, the actors' shortcomings are most noticeable. The self-confessions seem more like dispassionate monologues than the painful, soul-wrenching revelations that Miller intended them to be. During this confession scene the audience becomes confused as to how the characters are responding to one another. The focus of the play is diffused; the intensity of the drama is lost.

Just when the boys are most full of self-pity, beginning to wonder whether they have any kind of claim to each other's friendship and support, the coach steps in with his old pep talk. He plays a recording of the last ten seconds of the big game, and as the boys sit up and listen the bitterness begins to fade. Then the bad feelings disappear altogether as the coach plays the old school fight song and everyone stands up to sing.

"You've got to belong to something more than yourselves," the coach reminds his boys. So after bitter verbal exchanges he and his boys decide to stick together, not so much for old time's sake as for security in the here and now. They know that the past is dead, but they realize that their corpse of a memory is the best thing they have. That one moment of high school glory was the highpoint of the men's lives. The crowds cheered at them then, made them heroes. Nothing in later life has ever matched that thrill or yielded those honors. The boys cling to the past to rescue their pride, and they sport their memories as a shield against the present.

The power of Miller's writing is apparent even in the unsteady Boston production. The disturbing questions which the play raises about the meaning of success and happiness are still discernable. Unfortunately, the actors have added nothing to the impact of Miller's already forceful text. They have taken his championship game plan and forfeited their chances for success by failing to spend enough time learning their plays and practicing their teamwork.