Losers Take All the Critics

the thirties. Niggers shooting the police. THE CRITICS Government gone bad. And there’s no McCarthy to protect us.” Cox, a powerful Scottish actor with a hulking torso, makes his first entrance blowing a whistle—something not in- dicated in the script—and he ends up giving a strangely shrill performance. He layers the character with a thick im- pasto of sound and gesture, which skews the play and some of the coach’s humor THE THEATRE and nuance. Of the group, only the large, lumpish Jim Gaffigan, as George, shows in his flaccid body the sense of LOSERS TAKE ALL defeat that all the characters share. “I lose myself behind all the smiles, hand- Jason Miller and David Lindsay-Abaire on the wheel of misfortune. shakes, speeches,” he says. “I don’t think I’m the man I wanted to be. I seem to BY JOHN LAHR myself to be somebody else.” Gaffigan’s George is never better than in his dith- hen a play taps into the public’s of revelation, belongs, it seems to me, to ering outrage on learning that Phil, collective dreaming, problems of the genre of barroom dramas, such as who is thinking of withdrawing sup- structure,W excesses of language, and va- William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your port from his campaign, has slept with garies of casting can be all but obscured Life” or Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman his wife. Banished to the porch by the by the power of its spell. Jason Miller’s Cometh,” in which the truth-telling and coach, George shouts through the win- “That Championship Season” (revived the bad behavior flow as easily as the dow: “Did she tell you you were the at the Bernard B. Jacobs, under the crisp booze. The lustre of glory has gone from best, Phil, huh? Was she good? Tell direction of Gregory Mosher)—in which the middle-aged men who assemble to your friends, you dumb dago!” Of the the former members of a fabled Penn- remember their high times. George (Jim rest of the cast, Jason Patric seems to sylvania high-school basketball team and Gaffigan), a smug, self-absorbed mayor, have most of the fun. As Tom, the per- their coach reunite to relive their days of is facing a tough battle for reëlection; petually pie-eyed former point guard, glory—delved deep into the anxiety of Phil (Chris Noth), a sexual and envi- Patric, who is Jason Miller’s son, gets the nation when it premièred, in 1972. ronmental predator, has made a lot of to dispense little bombs of bile. When That year was a time of both tragic and money by strip-mining coal and is back- George recounts his decision to put his farcical retreat: it marked the beginning ing George’s campaign; James (Kiefer newborn son, who had Down’s syn- of the end of the Vietnam War, a defeat Sutherland), a junior-high-school prin- drome, directly into an institution, be- that cost fifty-eight thousand American cipal, sees himself as “a talented man cause “it casts reflection . unfavorable lives, and also the beginning of the long- being swallowed up by anonymity,” and to my image,” Tom chimes in, “You lose running Watergate fiasco. America’s ob- has hitched his political ambitions to the mongoloid vote.” session with victory at all costs was un- George’s falling star; and Tom ( Jason At the finale, after many awful be- dergoing a subtle revision; the cultural Patric) is the de-rigueur disenchanted trayals and admissions, the men sing the fixation was less on winning than on not drunk, lobbing acid thoughts. school song, take photographs for the losing. Now as then, “That Champion- In the midst of this crew of sad sacks reunion album, and make peace with ship Season” has moments of pure corn, is the coach (Brian Cox), who remains one another, if not with themselves. creaky exposition, and stock melodra- the fixed star in their cooling universe. They have long since lost the world that matic flourishes. Nonetheless, as Miller’s He pumps up his charges with what they still fondly think is up for grabs. hapless former teammates succumb to Brecht called “the black idea of win- The coach’s words, which sound eerily the fumes of their coach’s gospel of suc- ning.” “You have to hate to win,” the like those of some of today’s Tea Party cess and their alliances disintegrate, you coach says. The air is full of his compet- pols, hang in the air. “Somebody has to can feel the audience lock into the story. itive gas: “Exploiting a man’s weakness lead the country back again,” he says. Beneath the constant pep talks about is the name of the game”; “You endure “The race is to the quickest and this winning is a rueful sense of moral ex- pain to win”; “There is no such thing as country is fighting for her life, and we haustion, which plays as powerfully today second place.” He’s a sort of reactionary are the heart and we play always to win!” as it did in 1972. Red Auerbach, full of bombast and big- “That Championship Season” is set otry: “Communists are at work today. ome plays are dreamed up, some in a large, musty Victorian house, clut- Worse! Students burning down col- are whipped up, and some are tered with mahogany and memorabilia, leges. They’re bringing a defeated army Spainted by numbers: you can file Da- but the play, with its freewheeling en- home, kill you in the womb today, in vid Lindsay-Abaire’s “Good People” trances and exits and its merry-go-round the womb.” He goes on, “Worse than (directed by Daniel Sullivan, at Man- ABOVE: PHILIPPE WEISBECKER; OPPOSITE: ANDY FRIEDMAN 62 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 14, 2011 TNY—2011_03_14—PAGE 62—133SC.—LIVE ART AT TOP OF PAGE—PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY Reunion blues (clockwise from the front): Cox, Gaffigan, Patric, Sutherland, and Noth in “That Championship Season.” TNY—2011_03_14—PAGE 63—133SC.—LIVE ART R20614 hattan Theatre Club) under the Jon a man who would not in a million years Gnagy School of Playwriting. Instead allow such a manipulative, intrusive, de- of letting his characters find the story, lusional, and toxic termagant to attend. Lindsay-Abaire figures out what he But there’s more: using his six-year-old wants to say and imposes on them a daughter’s illness as an excuse, the un- situation that will say it. “Good People” derstandably wary doctor cancels the has a theme—the illusion of good- party. Margaret has been told that the ness—but no plausible story. There is party is cancelled; nonetheless, as you do nothing beneath its showy surface; it is, in bad drama, she comes anyway. so to speak, a text with no sub. At one point, as Mike and his wife, Margaret (the edgy, excellent Fran- Kate (Renée Elise Goldsberry), talk ces McDormand), a fifty-year-old high- about their relationship, Kate says, school dropout from South Boston, is “We’re having trouble. Jesus, ev- fired from her job at a dollar store for eryone knows! You spend five minutes chronic lateness. She uses her severely with us.” But by then we’ve spent disabled daughter as her excuse. “It was twenty minutes with them without a my Joycey again,” she says. Margaret hint of trouble, except one oblique ref- is feisty, quick, and reckless. Every- erence to seeing a counsellor. “Good thing about her, even her refusal to lis- People” gets interesting only when ten to authority—she’s a “mouthy from Margaret arrives at the house, and her Southie,” with a whiff of racism and ho- annihilating envy plays itself out. “You mophobia in her wisecracks—is plau- got lucky,” she tells Mike. “One hiccup sible; what’s implausible is the path that and it could’ve been you looking for Lindsay-Abaire sets her on. work instead of me.” Margaret is ruth- When one of her friends mentions less and unrelenting. We watch, at once an old Southie boy who made good, infuriated and fascinated, as she works Dr. Mike Dillon (the resourceful Tate to impose on Mike some of her own Donovan), whom Margaret dated for humiliation, going so far as to suggest two months in high school, she decides that he is the father of her handicapped to go and ask him for a job. To me, this daughter. “Don’t say you didn’t have is a stretch of the sociological imagina- help getting out of Southie,” she says. tion. A semi-literate woman with no “You had help. And not just your dad. professional skills decides on a whim to If I hadn’t let you go, you’d still be there ask an accomplished man she hasn’t right now.” Later, she adds, “I didn’t seen in more than thirty years to hire want to be the thing that ruined your her; the only reason I can see for this be- life. BECAUSE I WAS NICE.” After Kate havior, which goes against Margaret’s challenges her story, Margaret back- mortified, impoverished nature, is to get pedals and retracts the claim. The scene her within shouting distance of a class is scary, well-written stuff, which the conflict. No sooner is she in Mike’s of- actors perform skillfully, but Lindsay- fi ce than her defensive hostility starts to Abaire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for percolate. He uses “five-dollar words”; his play “Rabbit Hole” a few years ago, he attended the University of Penn- has been spending time in Hollywood, sylvania (“I didn’t go to U-Anywhere”); and the industry’s habitual glibness in- he lives in fashionable Chestnut Hill fects the ending of the play, which (“That’s all I ever wanted—a big house seems to me as fraudulent as it is be- somewhere”).

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