Theater Review­—

That Championship Season:

When It’s Time To Let The Past Become History

By Julie Stern

WESTPORT — In  his elegiac poem “To An Athlete Dying Young,”  British poet  A.E Housman warned that glory does not last, and “early though the laurel grows, it withers quicker than the rose…”      

Jason Miller’s That Championship Season is remarkable in its ability to capture both the intense power and joy of  high school sports,  as well as the  inevitable corruption of youthful dreams, and the deterioration of spirit that comes with middle age. Five men are currently bringing this work to life on the boards at Westport Country Playhouse, where performances continue until September 12.

George Sikowski, Phil Romano, and the brothers James and Tom Daley were once four of the five starters on the Filmore High basketball team that won an improbable last second upset victory to become Pennsylvania State Champions. Now twenty-some years later,  they have gathered at the home of their beloved “Coach,” the father figure who pushed them to the limits of their endurance and ability, for an annual celebration of that triumph.

At the outset, all seems promising. George is completing his first term as mayor of their small Lackawanna Valley city, and getting ready for his next campaign. James,  the principal of the local junior high, and father of five kids of his own, is hoping to become school superintendent once George is re-elected.

Phil, who inherited his father’s strip-mine coal business, is financially rich enough to help both of them. And Coach, still a vigorous manly figure despite a recent hospital stay for exploratory surgery, maintains a proprietary interest in his “boys,” advising George in his political campaign, and counseling them all on the virtues of morality,  healthy habit, and the brotherhood of the team.

But as the evening wears on and the liquor flows heavily, the cracks begin to appear, both in the relationships among these friends, and in the myths that shape their vision of life.

It is the early 1970s and the town is in an economic slump. Reminiscent of the Billy Joel song “Allentown,” the factories are closing down. George is a loudmouthed clown whose political regime is a morass of cronyism, graft, and inept blunders — such as spending $10,000 to purchase an elephant, which promptly died, and then taking two weeks to dispose of the corpse, finally burying it in one of Phil’s pits.

His only hope of defeating his challenger- an attractive reform candidate, running on environmental issues, is to stir up local anti-Semitism, because the man is Jewish. To get the publicity he wants, he needs to borrow a large sum from Phil- in return for which he will protect Phil from being charged with breaking environmental regulations.

Phil, who recognizes that George is a loser, is contemplating giving his money to the challenger, in return for the same “favors.” But if George loses the election, James will not get the patronage appointment he craves.  In a burst of rage he reveals to George that George’s wife is having an affair with Phil- a long-time philanderer.

Only the alcoholic ne’er-do-well Tom Daley is able to see things clearly. The drunker he gets, the sharper his sarcastic digs at the others  cut through the false bonhomie, the pretense of happy marriages and successful careers. The half time of their lives is a period of midlife crisis.

Worst of all, trying to fire them up, Coach is revealed as a sick, angry, hate-filled bigot. In his tribute to great leaders of the past, he cites as his great heroes Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy, and rails indiscriminately against niggers, kikes and Communists who are ruining the country. (Yes, the play comes with a warning that it contains “strong language and mature content.”)

In politics, as in basketball, winning is everything, and he is determined to knock his boys’ heads together until they get the victory that makes them men. His pep talk is a mixture of sports cliché and all out war, and it is clear that the two are hopelessly blurred in his mind. Even when Tom prods them into remembering the fifth member of the team — the star player who actually made the winning basket — and facing up to why that boy, Martin, has never joined in these annual victory commemorations,  Coach shouts him down and silences them all with his ritualistic playing of the radio broadcast of The Game. Even Tom is seduced by the memory of that time in their lives when greatness seemed possible, and they were truly brothers in arms.

Miller wrote his play in 1972, but it has uncanny resonance today. As directed by Mark Lamos, and beautifully acted by Robert Clohessy, John Dorman Lou Liberatore, Tom Nelis and Skipp Sudduth, the bluster and pretense seems all too familiar, recalling talk radio tirades and “tea party” disruptions with their appeals to fear and hatred. Our country has always had a dark side in that democracy and free speech has given rise to “Know Nothings” and the Ku Klux Klan, the mobs who screamed at  school children in Little Rock, and those who menaced Muslims in the name of 9/11.

While sports can be a genuine way for youth to develop and display honor and courage and discipline — the “warrior spirit” — it is sad when politicians, in the pursuit of “victory at any cost,” engage in speech and behavior that is dishonorable and cowardly, and sometimes, the people watching, are too ignorant and ill-informed to tell the difference.