The Dust of Glory

By T.E.K.

THAT CHAMPIONSHIP SEASON

by JASON MILLER

A vital and effective theater group is more than a random assembly of actors, directors, designers, composers and a producer. To succeed, it must be the closest of families, bound by a common purpose and a consistent vision. This is the basic strength of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater. Prolific in quantity and distinguished in quality, the Public Theater's productions are linked by one theme: a running critique of U.S. life today.

Like a Socratic questioner, Papp wants to know what has happened to the American dream. What are the prevailing values, hopes and desires? Do they ennoble or corrupt the people who hold them? What has been the psychic cost of Viet Nam? Do Americans believe in the brotherhood of man, or do the words merely camouflage a stubborn residue of racial and ethnic bigotry?

Most of these questions are raised with subtlety and without polemics in That Championship Season, a drama of searing intensity, agonized compassion and consummate craftsmanship. The play centers on the 20th reunion of a handful of men whose lives were once fresh as mountain springs and now resemble the sooty detritus of a city gutter. A silver trophy stands as a cenotaph for their one moment of glory, when they won a high school basketball title.

Journey to Defeat. Life has recast them as a pudgy, crooked mayor grubbing for re-election (Charles Durning), a philandering, strip-mining moneybags (Paul Sorvino), an amusingly cynical alcoholic (Walter McGinn), and his bitter school superintendent of a brother (Michael McGuire). Their old coach (Richard A. Dysart) is a whiplash of a man embalmed in the Vince Lombardi philosophy. But these men have lost the game of life, and in their rasping revelations `a la Virginia Woolf and their boozy camaraderie `a la The Boys in the Band, the playgoer finds out why.

They are all dead behind the eyes, but vividly, wincingly alive in the theater. Playwright Jason Miller, 33, whose only previous full-length play, Nobody Hears a Broken Drum, was a quick flop, has chiseled out each role to give it the clean profile of humanity and of pity. The actors do him proud, seeming to have traveled every step of the way, from adolescent victory to middle-aged defeat, laughing and crying together. Director A.J. Antoon, who directed Cymbeline in Central Park last summer, has wrung a triumph of ensemble acting from these splendid players. To Joseph Papp, "Bravo!" once again. Serious drama has no finer friend. .T.E.K.

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