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(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Theater of Cruelty 

I'm in downtown Silver Spring (well, I was in downtown Silver Spring yesterday... but this you-are-there use of the present-tense is fun, so let's go with it...) in the Roundhouse Theater.

I'm the youngest person in the audience.

When you retire in America, it's community theater all the way.

The tiny stage is a scruffy bit of football field; game-day music tinkles behind us.

I'm here to see Red Shirts, a play about bigtime university sports.





"How many people here was a real football player?" A codger two rows down addresses us as we wait for things to start.

A tinny old lady answers: "Were you?" Belligerent.

He doesn't hear her. Like everyone in the room except UD, he wears a hearing aid.

Who knew so many Americans abused Viagra?





UD's basically impressed by the play, but she agrees with the reviewers who say that the author tried to pack much too much - plot, character, idea - into it. Slimmed down, it'll be a strong treatment of a serious subject, one that an opinion piece in today's New York Times gets at too -- the exploitation of often culturally and economically disadvantaged college athletes because of the absurd conceit that they're all college students. We pretend, writes Michael Lewis, that these people are

students first, and football players second. They are like Franciscan monks set down in the gold mine. Yes, they play football, but they have no interest in the money. What they're really living for is that degree in criminology.


And they're really keen on English lit too. The funniest scene in the play -- and it's a smart, well-written play -- is a poetry-analysis practice session with coach, when the guys try to make sense of Emily Dickinson:

My nosegays are for captives;
Dim, long-expectant eyes,
Fingers denied the plucking,
Patient till paradise,

To such, if they should whisper
Of morning and the moor,
They bear no other errand,
And I, no other prayer.


The many ways the guys say what the hell? are hilarious, and UD loved it.

The English professor is a thankless role in this sort of drama -- if she doesn't care, she's contemptible; if she does, she's a scathing schoolmarm destroying the school and the players' prospects. As this character pursues sanctions against team members for cheating, one of them says to her: "You think the coach is gonna let a pissant professor knock out his game? He makes two million dollars a year."

Just as thankless is the learning specialist who tries to explain the English professor to the players: "She wants to know that you can assert and defend a position on a poem." But, says a player, "Nobody gives a shit about Paradise Lost."




The play concludes a bit awkwardly -- its plot meanders and never finds enlightenment -- so that UD doesn't leave the theater with the aesthetic payoff she'd have liked. But the heart of the thing is pure, with a pure appraisal of the inhumanity at the heart of Division I university football.