The Believability of Basketball

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between performer and character body in plays that stage sporting action. It analyses the relationship between character, the performer’s body, and sporting action as it pertains to female characters in twenty-first century English-language American plays. The chapter outlines in greater detail, the participation and popularity of women’s sports in the grew throughout the twentieth century. It performs a close analysis of Meg Miroshnik’s The Tall Girls. Set in an unnamed fictional town in the United States in the 1930s, the play stages the story of the town’s high school girls’ basketball team and their coach, the much older Haunt Johnny who has returned to the small town under mysterious circumstances. In The Tall Girls, the historical context is important as it inflects the characters’ participation in the sport and the overall level of skill of the sporting action performed.