Reviewed by: Sports Plays ed. by Eero Laine and Broderick Chow Sharon Mazer SPORTS PLAYS. Edited by Eero Laine and Broderick Chow. London: Routledge, 2022; pp. 239. Sports Plays breaks new ground in inviting contributors to look at how theatre makers have taken up the challenge of representing diverse sports practices and the often-ambivalent social meanings produced as a result. The editors Eero Laine and Broderick Chow begin by asking: “Why put sports on stage?” (1). Both sports and theatre, they note, are part of entertainment culture, performed to be looked at and, for the most part, conventionally constructed with ideas of conflict at center. Sporting events are “designed to be entertaining” (1), as such, intrinsically theatrical. Why then, “would anyone want to watch a play about baseball instead of just going to a baseball game?” (1), they ask, and what is to be achieved in (re)creating the spectacle of a sporting event within the confines of the theatrical environment? Yet, as theatrical as sports are, their associated practices are not readily transferrable to the stage. Pause for a moment and imagine a play in which actors are expected to progress a plot while at the same time safely batting a tennis ball over a net or shooting hoops. Even fight choreography necessarily deviates from the dance-like moves of a boxing, martial arts or professional wrestling exhibition in its turn from the real (or not-quite-not real) of staged hand-to-hand combat to the drama-turgical exigencies of the theatre. Sports Plays is prefaced by a brief essay by David Henry Hwang. Anticipating the complexities ahead, Hwang muses on his desire to write a musical based on the life of Bruce Lee. “Why,” Hwang asks, “should he sing, when he already expresses himself most eloquently through martial arts?” (xvii). More critically, perhaps, what might it mean to translate Lee’s exquisite physical artistry into choreography? Having got as far as an Off-Broadway play titled Kung Fu – less musical, more “dancical” (xvii) – Hwang tells us he accepted defeat, although the aspiration lingers. For Hwang, “sports and theatre do not inhabit separate, irreconcilable worlds. On the contrary, both are fundamentally dramatic, sagas of physical and mental skill and acuity that play out before our eyes” (xviii). These sentiments are echoed by Harvey Young, who introduces the first suite of essays by reminding us that: “Theatre and sports share an emphasis on structures of seeing (spectating) and hearing (audiencing). In both, we identify protagonists and find drama in their engagements with others” (14). The essays that follow revolve around these fundamental recognitions, while also seeking to deepen our understanding of the pleasures peculiar to watching and thinking about sports plays. The range of sporting genres represented is wide: boxing; martial arts; basketball; baseball; American football; soccer; rugby; field hockey; tennis; professional wrestling; and cheerleading. Gymnastics and track and field are also mentioned in a number of the prefatory essays. The book is structured in four parts, each prefaced by a brief essay that, like Hwang’s opening passage, offer a positioned perspective. Topics overlap and intersect. The chapters about race necessarily address questions of gender and vice versa, while essays on the theatricalization of combat incorporate discussions of race and gender. The final part is labeled “sports equipment,” although its two chapters are focused first on plays featuring undressed male athletes and then on plays about scantily clothed female cheerleaders. The first part, “Sports/Race,” is illuminated by Harvey Young’s thoughtful examination of what happens when race takes centerstage in sports as in theatre. Young reminds us: “Histories of race and legacies of racism ghost sports” (14). He observes the ways that star athletes like Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles, and Colin Kaepernick have turned their performances in the spotlight toward demands for racial justice, and how plays like August Wilson’s Fences and The Great White Hope by Howard Sackler have “the ability to bear witness to racialized experiences” (16). The three chapters that follow look at plays that demonstrate this capacity for illumination and in so doing potentially indict the racialist underpinnings of both sport and theatre. In “‘Surviving against the Sharp White [Tennis] Background...
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Oct 1, 2023
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