Free for All by Kenneth Turan

Free for All by Kenneth Turan

Author:Kenneth Turan [Turan, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53204-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00


17

That Championship Season

1972

Charles Durning and Walter McGinn © Friedman-Abeles

Wow! Here at last is the perfect Broadway play of the season, perfectly acted and perfectly staged. There is only one minor thing wrong with it. It happens not to be on Broadway. The play is Jason Miller’s That Championship Season and it opened last night at the handsome Newman Theater in Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater complex. It is gorgeous and triumphant …

Five men meet in a house somewhere in the Lackawanna Valley. Four of them were part of the team that won the Pennsylvania High School Basketball Championship in 1952. The fifth was, and seemingly still is, their Coach. It is his house, and every year they get together to relive their past glory.

One of them is the Mayor of the town, a small Allegheny township of 54,000 souls, more or less. Another is the town’s chief industrialist and polluter, a made-good businessman who specializes in strip-coal mining, women and fast cars. The third is a local high school principal, and supporter of the Mayor. The last is the teacher’s brother, a visiting alcoholic from the Coast.

For a long night’s journey into day they talk and fight. They bare themselves and their beliefs and their towns. They are funny, obscene and tragic. They are lost people. The Mayor is a middle-aged buffoon with a beaten face. But these are all beaten people, living in the past. That basketball success was their finest hour. And that, it turns out, was a fraud …

I remember Mr. Miller’s first play so well that I never expected to be seeing his second. But this is a quite different matter. Here the playwright is dealing with a world he knows and understands, and he treats it with a wary mixture of love and disdain …



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