Playwright: Jason Miller
At: Red Hen Theatre, 5123 N. Clark St.
Phone: ( 773 ) 728-0599; $25
Runs through: March 2
Put a bunch of men in a room together with a well-stocked bar and it may be assumed that the liquor and testosterone will soon flow like the Mighty Mississippi. But when it's 1972, the men are the 1952 State High School Basketball League champions, and the leader ( identified only as 'the coach' ) whom they have gathered to honor still claims Theodore Roosevelt and Joseph McCarthy as his heroeswell, it doesn't take long for the dynamic to get pretty disorderly.
That Championship Season is not just hormones, however. Author Jason Miller was an actor himself. And his play, while ostensibly an exploration of the Masculine Mystique, also provides its ensemble the opportunity to tug at our heartstrings with great gobs of tough-tender sentiment as they dribble and feint their way through a series of no-longer-shocking revelations leading to an equally predictable ending.
And why not? The heroic myths engendered by post-WWII tales of 'bomber-squadron' glory are most likely what spurred both our patriarch and his surrogate-son followers to excellence, even as their valuesunquestioning obedience to authority, suppression of dissent, victory at all costswould later brand them failures. But if there was reason for us to fear and jeer these attitudes in 1972, history has shown those who espoused them to have been dinosaurs on the brink of extinction. Thus, in 2003, this Red Hen production can afford to extend compassion to these naive, but not unconscionable, forefathers.
The show features an all-star line-up: Scott Cummins as George, the glad-handing mayor dazzled by his own campaign literature. Steve Cardamone as James, his ambitious lackey. Doug MacKechnie as Phil, whose money has become a burden and a stigma. Paul Noble as Tom, the self-made boozer commenting on his comrades' fates with alcohol-fueled insolence. And Gene Janson as the icon nurtured on adolescent adoration, now reduced to an object of dutiful veneration by disciples grown older and wiser. Under Steve Scott's deft direction, these players navigate Robert A. Knuth's boat-in-the-bottle set ( note the doorways leading to offstage rooms ) with a bearish boisterousness masking teamwork as agile and focused as the Harlem Globetrotters.