Archives for March 8, 2011

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the first Broadway revival of Jason Miller’s That Championship Season, which is awful (the play, that is, not the production). Here’s an excerpt.
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Good or bad, every work of art is a time capsule, and sometimes it’s the worst ones that contain the most information about what the world was like when they were new. In the ’70s American playgoers rushed to embrace Jason Miller’s “That Championship Season” as a masterpiece of hard-hitting truth-telling. It ran for 944 performances, won a Pulitzer and was turned into a movie that starred Robert Mitchum. Today “That Championship Season,” which is now being revived on Broadway for the first time, looks like what it is, a quasi-political cartoon whose smugness stinks like dime-store perfume. Even so, I doubt that any other play that opened on Broadway in 1972 has more to tell us about the self-satisfied attitudes of the generation that made it a hit.
Miller, an actor-turned-playwright who is remembered (if at all) for having played the priest in “The Exorcist,” apparently wrote “That Championship Season” to exorcise what he regarded as the collective sins of those Americans who, like him, grew up in the benighted Age of Eisenhower. The play’s five characters are residents of a city indistinguishable from Scranton, the medium-sized Pennsylvania town where Mr. Miller grew up. In youth four of them played together on a high-school basketball team whose coach (Brian Cox) is hosting a reunion dinner at his home. The men seem friendly, but appearances are deceiving, for Phil (Chris Noth) has had an affair with the wife of George (Jim Gaffigan), the mayor of the town where the play is set, and is secretly planning to throw his financial support behind another candidate in the next election….
I won’t say that a better playwright might not have been able to make something watchable out of this clichéd scenario, but what Mr. Miller made out of it in 1972 was pretty much what you’d have expected from a second-rate writer born in 1939 who had drunk deep from the well of the ’60s and now proposed to inform his audiences that their parents’ values were comprehensively corrupt. Hence the coach, a boorish, ill-educated stage-Irish blowhard who proudly displays pictures of Teddy Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Fightin’ Joe McCarthy on his mantelpiece and salts his small talk with good old-fashioned ethnic slurs of the highest possible voltage, thereby alerting the audience to his lack of enlightenment….
Were there really people like the coach? Certainly, and plenty of them, too–but the ludicrous lack of subtlety with which Miller portrays this one kills “That Championship Season” stone dead. Every five pages or so, the action, such as it is, comes to a halt so that he can deliver a sermonette crammed full of his personal prejudices…
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Read the whole thing here.

“Poets tend to be poor lyricists because their verse has its own inner music and doesn’t make allowance for the real thing.”
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat