The Plays of T. S. Eliot

by Kirk Woodward 

[After his report on Norman Marshall’s book “The Producer and the Play,” posted on Rick On Theater last 20 July, Kirk Woodward returns with a somewhat more ambitious project: reading and discussing all of poet T. S. Eliot’s plays.

[I say “somewhat more ambitious” because Eliot only wrote a handful of plays; his poetry was much more voluminous.  It was also far better known and generally more admired as well.  On the other hand, he wrote his stage works in verse, a challenge for both the writer and the theatergoer in the first half of the 20th century.

[I’ll leave Kirk to assess the results from the perspective of a theater guy with a background in writing, directing, and acting (as even sometime ROTters will know). 

[I must say that Kirk’s selected a subject about which I know little myself.  He was an English major in college (I studied French and German—not much help here), so his foundation in literature, including poetry, is way firmer than mine.  I learned many details about Eliot and his plays (several of which I’d even read long ago).  I suspect that you will, too.]

The poetry of T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965) is widely considered a landmark in literature. His long poem The Waste Land (1922) is generally deemed to have begun the modern era in poetry, and I consider his Four Quartets, published between 1936 and 1942, to be among the great accomplishments of literature, a work I’ve “lived with” for a long time.

However, Eliot’s plays, written in “free verse” (defined as “poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter,” a subject to be discussed below), are not as well known today as his poetry, although they received attention and various kinds of success when they were produced. Those plays are:

Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926, first performed 1934)
The Rock (1934)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Cocktail Party (1949)
The Confidential Clerk (1953)
The Elder Statesman (first performed 1958, published 1959)

Eliot’s greatest theatrical “hit,” of course, was none of these plays, but the extraordinarily successful musical Cats (1981), in which Andrew Lloyd Weber (b. 1948) set a number of poems from Eliot’s volume of light verse Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) to music (with contributions from others). The original London and New York productions ran for 16,434 performances between them.

Today plays written in verse (as opposed to musicals) are rare, but nearly every well-known English-speaking poet since William Shakespeare (1564-1616) has at least toyed with the “poetic drama.” (Recently, La Bête, a 1991 play in rhymed couplets by David Hirson, had a successful run in London and has been popular in regional theaters in the U.S., and Mike Bartlett’s 2014 blank verse play King Charles III had a record-breaking run in London and was broadcast on both the BBC and PBS.)

Among the “great modern poets,” William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) not only wrote plays but for years was a central figure at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Along the same lines, W. H. Auden (1907-1973) wrote two plays with Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935) and The Ascent of F6 (1937), wrote several opera libretti, and translated works by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

I have read the Auden plays and some of Yeats’ plays, but I realized I knew next to nothing about Eliot’s, so I set out to read all of them. In his essay “Poetry and Drama” (1951), Eliot describes what he had in mind in attempting to write “poetic drama”:

I have before my eyes a kind of mirage of the perfection of verse drama, which would be a design of human action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and of musical order. . . . To go as far in this direction as it is possible to go, without losing that contact with the ordinary everyday world with which drama must come to terms, seems to me the proper aim of dramatic poetry.

A tall order, and I have tried to keep it in mind as I’ve read his plays. I read them in the reverse order from that in which they were written, because I suspected that the later the play, the closer it might be to “ordinary” drama, and that as a result the more spectacular “poetic” effects in the plays might be found in the earlier plays, making a kind of climax to my reading.

I tried to read the plays naively, responding to what I read rather than passing along the critical judgments of others.

The plot of The Elder Statesman, the last of Eliot’s plays, was suggested to him by the Greek tragedy Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles (c. 496/7-406/5 BC). He based all his plays beginning with The Family Reunion on Greek dramas; however, none of those plays of his are set in ancient times – they all have contemporary settings.

Almost immediately this fact suggests a difficulty for Eliot. His poetry extensively uses the devices of fragmentation and discontinuity. He assembled his poems, most famously The Waste Land, from bits of quotations and thoughts jammed together in what might seem random order. Those devices can also be used in plays, of course, but only deliberately and sparingly. Generally speaking a play needs some sort of story, continuity, plot.

Those were never Eliot’s métier. How well does he handle the replacement of some of his major poetic devices? He recognizes the problem. In “Poetry and Drama” (which is a worthwhile essay all the way through), he writes:

The first thing of any importance that I discovered, was that a writer who has worked for years, and achieved some success, in writing other kinds of verse, has to approach the writing of a verse play in a different frame of mind from that to which he has been accustomed in his previous work. . . . You are deliberately writing verse for other voices, not your own, and you do not know whose voices they will be. . . . Every line must be judged by a new law, that of dramatic utterance.

As far as verse goes, this was his solution:

What I worked out is substantially what I have continued to employ: a line of varying length and varying number of syllables, with a caesura and three stresses. The caesura and the stresses may come at different places, almost anywhere in the line; the stresses may be close together or well separated by light syllables; the only rule being that there must be one stress on one side of the caesura and two on the other. 

This may sound technical, but it is easy to understand. Shakespeare’s blank verse ordinarily has five stresses to a line (the stresses are in boldface here):

            But, soft! What light through yon-der win-dow breaks?

Eliot says he chose a three stress line, something like:

            Yes, Charles. I’m sure that I want to marry you

In this sentence the caesura comes at the period. Because Eliot doesn’t care how many syllables are in a line, this verse form is extremely loose, as this quotation illustrates. To my ear that particular verse form provides a sort of forward motion for the dialogue – unconsciously the hearer feels a pattern pushing itself ahead.

However, neither Shakespeare nor Eliot limit themselves strictly to a single pattern. Shakespeare frequently varies his meter for emphasis, variety, and surprise; so does Eliot. But the form of the verse provides a home base for it, a standard which can always be varied, depending on the needs of the drama.

As I read Eliot’s plays it seems to me that he regularly shifts between three, four, and five stresses per line. I might be wrong; he might read the lines differently; and he simply might vary meter from line to line, as he does in his poetry, according to the needs of the scene.

However, determining the meter of a line is a subjective matter. My impression is that Eliot feels that as long as there is some rhythmic structure to a line, it doesn’t matter much what that structure is. After all, that is also the way he has composed his non-dramatic poetry.

But so far we are speaking about verse (which according to the dictionary is “writing arranged with a metrical rhythm”). What about poetry (“special intensity given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm”)?

Eliot knows that a great deal of drama will be only verse, not poetry, even in a “poetic” play  – but he wants to be able to include poetry when it’s appropriate, something he feels that plays completely written in prose can’t do.

The poetic drama in prose is more limited by poetic convention or by our conventions as to what subject matter is poetic, than is the poetic drama in verse. A really dramatic verse can be employed, as Shakespeare employed it, to say the most matter-of-fact things.

That is to say, a play in verse can handle the ordinary as well as the poetic, but a play in prose can’t switch from the ordinary to poetry easily, or perhaps at all. So with exceptions in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot’s plays are entirely in verse.

THE ELDER STATESMAN

How does all this work out in practice? As I said, I began my reading with the last play Eliot wrote, The Elder Statesman, the story suggested by Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. No need for dread – the Greek tragedy provides only the barest scaffolding for the plot: a famous British statesman has retired, and into his life come several figures from the less reputable moments of his past.

The effect of this situation is comic, not tragic, as one person after another pops up with yet another story of how the “statesman” could have done better, usually by making the complainer happier. The resolution of the situation is also comic, as the group of self-deceivers deceives themselves together, and the statesman is free at least to die at peace.

The heart of the play resides primarily in its language. A number of passages from the play echo Eliot’s better-known poetry, particularly the Four Quartets, which shares with Statesman an interest in time, in consequences, in the futility of blame, and in forgiveness and love. Amid the verse, the poetry is sometimes lovely. In Act I, talking about her love for her fiancée Charles, the statesman’s daughter Monica says:

How did this come, Charles? It crept so softly
On silent feet, and stood behind my back
Quietly, a long time, a long long time
Before I felt its presence. 

Gomez, one of the miscreants, says:

You’ll come to feel easier when I’m with you
Than when I’m out of sight. You’ll be afraid of whispers,
The reflection in the mirror of the face behind you,
The ambiguous smile, the distant salutation,
The sudden silence when you enter the smoking room. 

I enjoy The Elder Statesman for what it is: a primarily verbal play, with a great deal of exposition, a modest plot (Sophocles’ plot isn’t one of the great ones either), a charming and worthwhile experience for an audience willing to enjoy a couple of hours of elegant intelligence.

THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK

The Confidential Clerk is based on a play by Euripides (c. 480-406 BC) called Ion (written perhaps around 407 BC) that is not particularly well known today and that has been sometimes described as a “romantic drama” rather than a tragedy. The website for The Actors Company Theatre [http://tactnyc.org/the-confidential-clerk-notes/], in an excellent article on Eliot’s play, summarizes Euripides’ plot as follows:

Ion is the son of the god Apollo and Creusa, an Athenian princess, left to die by Creusa but secretly saved by Apollo. Xuthus, Creusa’s husband, is later led to believe that Ion is his own child, and the jealous Creusa plots to kill Ion. At the last minute, Ion’s identity is revealed, and mother and son are reunited. 

The ultimately positive nature of the play by Euripides is a reminder that his plays cannot all be captured under the label of “Greek tragedy,” something we will see again in another of Eliot’s plays. In The Confidential Clerk, the clerk discovers that he may be the illegitimate son of a rich man, or of the man’s wife; while the others in the play make various discoveries about themselves and the choices they have made in their lives.

Because Eliot is both an important literary figure and a notable theological mind, one might feel a temptation to impose Eliot’s known ideas on a particular work. This impulse is common but unwise. To use the example of another playwright: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) loudly announced his public position on many issues, and surely his plays endorse those positions – except that they often don’t.

It is certainly possible to see complicated theological ideas behind The Confidential Clerk, and some reviewers saw them – while others bemoaned their lack. Michael Maccaby, writing in The Harvard Review, offered this perspective:

In its evangelical message, it seems strangely more Calvinistic than Anglican (man finds God through himself without mention of the church and with a predestined role). And these moralistic overtones make the characters into theological robots rather than into the crisp, little chessmen of The Cocktail Party. Much as I enjoy the intellectual exercise The Confidential Clerk imposes, I had the feeling, when it was all over, that the equations didn't balance, not even when you accept the particular set of coordinates in which Eliot chooses to devote his life.

I see very little of Maccaby’s description in the play; his “Calvinistic/Anglican” observation leaves me dumbfounded. I also don’t agree that the characters in the play are “theological robots” (except of course in the sense that Eliot did determine who says what – but that’s true of any play).  Nor can I see that the play’s purpose is “evangelical.” What in the world would it convert one to?

I see the play as the dramatization of a question: where do our impulses and our decisions come from? From reason? From heredity? From circumstances? From the suggestions of other people? From God, in some way or other? From “the spirits”? And if they don’t come from within ourselves, what does that say about who we are?

Whatever the answer, as we grow we become specific people. Does it help to look back and see how we might have been something different? As the character Sir Claude says: “Where ought we to be? What ought we to be doing?”

A hint: family relationships in the play turn out to be closer than one might imagine. If one wants to extrapolate that to the “family of God” or something of the sort, Eliot won’t stop you.

In fact family relationships become quite tangled in the third act, and I am not sure how that act would play; but at its heart is a story of mercy and a great deal of forgiveness, or at least acceptance.

The Confidential Clerk was generally successful in its original productions in London and New York. The writing is bright and often funny. Eric Bentley (1916-2020) reviewed the Broadway production for The New Republic in 1953 and wrote:

If anyone should see The Confidential Clerk without knowing who wrote it, the last thing he would write in his diary that night would be: “Have just seen typical Broadway play.” It is true that the play falls short of both its main objectives: it is neither a great poetic drama nor a great light comedy. It is completely sui generis – praiseworthy or not, according to your own position. My position being a reviewer’s aisle seat, I must praise the play as more entertaining than 99 shows out of 100 – and in a different way. If you like being talked to by an incurably didactic but suave, eloquent, and intelligent uncle, you will enjoy listening to The Confidential Clerk. And in fact the Broadway audience does seem to enjoy it.

But must a play be categorized? Why can’t it be itself?

THE COCKTAIL PARTY

The Cocktail Party was the most commercially successful of Eliot’s “drawing room” plays. Its Broadway production ran for 409 performances and won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play – remarkable accomplishments for a play by a sophisticated, modernist poet (though of course it was no Cats).

The fact that the splendid actor Alec Guinness (1914-2000) played the “unknown guest” on Broadway may have had something to do with the play’s success. But the most likely reason is that it is a fascinating play, not to everyone’s taste perhaps, and containing a number of things today’s audiences might not think they’re interested in . . . but remarkable all the same.

It is framed at beginning and end, logically enough, by a cocktail party. In a larger sense, though, the cocktail party stands for life on the surface, the socially adapted world we live in as images of the people we’d like to be, a symbol like Vanity Fair, as it’s used by John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) or William Thackeray’s 1847-48 novel Vanity Fair. Eliot aims to dig as deeply below that surface as he can.

The party that opens the play is a rollicking scene, with Eliot in full control of his material, bringing characters in and out in hilarious ways, and drawing, at least as I hear it, on Eliot’s love for popular song, which keeps breaking through his poetry and, here, his play:

It’s such a nice party, I hate to leave it.
It’s such a nice party, I’d like to repeat it.
Why don’t you all come to dinner on Friday? 

Eliot writes of The Cocktail Party:

I tried to keep in mind that in a play, from time to time, something should happen: that the audience should be kept in the constant expectation that something is going to happen; and that, when it does happen, it should be different, but not too different, from what the audience had been led to expect.

A familiar theme of Eliot’s poetry, particularly in the Four Quartets, is the continual alteration of personality – we are not the same people we were ten minutes ago, or the same we will be ten minutes from now. This theme recurs repeatedly in The Cocktail Party.

A related major theme of the play is “knowing someone” – how do we know others, how much can we know about them, how much can we know ourselves. At the center of the play is a marriage where two people know very little about each other, and perhaps about themselves . . . and also a woman who can’t relate to the world.

The “unknown guest” to whom Eliot refers, on being asked “To what does this lead?” answers:

                        To finding out
What you really are. What you really feel.
What you really are among other people.
Most of the time we take ourselves for granted,
As we have to, and live on a little knowledge
About ourselves as we were. Who are you now?
You don’t know any more than I do,
But rather less. You are nothing but a set
Of obsolete responses. The one thing to do
Is to do nothing. Wait. 

The play could also be titled “The Unexpected Guest” or perhaps “The Perfect Guest,” a figure who is for some unknown reason at the first cocktail party, and who seems to know more than anyone else about the disappearance of the host’s wife. He turns out to be – not to give too much away – a catalyst for self-discovery.

The self-discoverers are the married couple, who through a sort of therapy return to their marriage accepting their own and the other’s faults, and able to be kind to each other. That, it appears, is one way to live a worthwhile life.

The other way, taken by one of the couple’s friends, is the way of self-sacrifice, and we learn later that she literally has given her life, in an appalling fashion, while serving others. In other words, she has taken the path of the saint, which as far as the play goes is one of only two ways to live meaningfully.  The two paths, the play says, have commonalities, links between the two worlds:

Such experience can only be hinted at
In myths and images. To speak about it
We talk of darkness, labyrinths, Minotaur terrors.
But that world does not take the place of this one.
Do you imagine that the Saint in the desert
With spiritual evil always at his shoulder
Suffered any less from hunger, damp, exposure,
Bowel trouble, and the fear of lions,
Cold of the night and heat of the day, than we should? 

Eliot became an Anglican (in the United States we would say an Episcopalian) in 1927. All his dramatic works except the first (which Eliot himself saw as poetry rather than drama) were written after that date. From that point on, both Eliot’s poetry and his plays begin to take account of theology.

However, both as a poet and as a dramatist, Eliot knows the value of the symbol as opposed to the flat statement.  Certainly this is so in The Cocktail Party. Metaphysics is always in the air, the words “mystery” and “vision” appear, there are references to “the Guardians” (whoever they may be), and so on. And how does the “unknown guest” know so much?   

Still, as Thomas Howard points out in Dove Descending (2006), a study of the Four Quartets, despite its religious themes Eliot never mentions God, Jesus, and so on by name. The same is true of his plays discussed so far. He is a poet and his job is to evoke, not to invoke.

Eliot’s choice of a Greek play on which to base The Cocktail Party is Alcestis (438 BC) by Euripides, frequently referred to as a “tragedy with a happy ending,” and one of my favorite ancient Greek dramas. However, Eliot doesn’t take much from it. He writes:

I was still inclined to go to a Greek dramatist for my theme, but I was determined to take this merely as a point of departure, and to conceal the origins so well that nobody would identify them until I pointed them out myself. In this at least I have been successful; for no one of my acquaintance (and no dramatic critics) recognized the source of my story in the Alcestis of Euripides. In fact, I have had to go into detailed explanation to convince them — I mean, of course, those who were familiar with the plot of that play — of the genuineness of the inspiration. But those who were at first disturbed by the eccentric behavior of my unknown guest, and his apparently intemperate habits and tendency to burst into song, have found some consolation after I have called their attention to the behavior of Heracles in Euripides’ play.

There is a bit more connection between the two plays than he suggests, but not much more. As for its verse form, I found I was reading the play as prose. Eliot in fact says:

I laid down for myself the ascetic rule to avoid poetry which could not stand the test of strict dramatic utility: with such success, indeed, that it is perhaps an open question whether there is any poetry in the play at all.

I haven’t seen a production of The Cocktail Party, but from reading it I would think a director would find it a delight to stage.

In the three plays we have discussed so far, theology as I said is mostly implicit. On the other hand, why shouldn’t issues of religion be dramatized, if that’s what the playwright wants to do? – although today they seldom are, certainly not in the way Eliot does.

THE FAMILY REUNION

For the first of his modern setting, “drawing room” plays, Eliot chose as his model the Greek tragedy The Eumenides by Aeschylus (c. 525/524-c. 456/455 BC) – a heavy hitter. The Eumenides are the former Furies, supernatural agents of retribution, renamed “Gracious Ones” (Eumenides) by the goddess Athena at the end of Aeschylus’ play.

In The Eumenides (458 BC), the Furies pursue Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, the wife of King Agamemnon of Mycenae. The goddess Athena arranges for a trial, presumably the first in Greek history, a model for the future Greek city-states. Orestes is acquitted.

In The Family Reunion Harry, the Orestes figure, is convinced that he has murdered, not his mother, but his wife, although this is not the case. She was accidentally swept overboard on an ocean voyage, but Harry had the impression that he had pushed her over – because he wanted to.

He has become unhinged (which makes his deeply poetic speech somewhat more plausible). In the end Harry, like other Eliot figures, leaves his home on a mystic task, announced but not explained. There is no trial, and not much of a benediction.

We have seen the modest, rather poetic ambitions of Eliot’s plays that followed The Family Reunion. In this play, however, there is nothing modest about the poetry. It fills the play, not least because there is a chorus, like a Greek chorus, of aunts and an uncle, who definitely speak in poetic verse. As Harry says in the play,

                                 that’s not the language
       That I choose to be talking. I will not talk yours. 

Eliot wrote the first of his Four Quartets before he began The Family Reunion, and the other three after the play. Much of the Quartets is echoed in the play, or vice versa, as in these lines from the play: 

The sudden solitude in a crowded desert
In a thick smoke, many creatures moving
Without direction, for no direction
Leads anywhere but round and round in that vapour –
Without purpose, and without principle of conduct
In flickering intervals of light and darkness;
The partial anesthesia of suffering without feeling
And partial observation of one’s own automatism
While the slow stain sinks deeper through the skin
Tainting the flesh and discolouring the bone –
This is what matters, but it is unspeakable,
Untranslatable: I talk in general terms
Because the particular has no language. 

Many of the major themes of the Quartets are contained in that one speech. For those who love the Quartets, as I do, and knew them before reading The Family Reunion, the play feels like welcoming back an old friend.

But I make this point primarily to illustrate that the poetry throughout The Family Reunion is intense. Eliot was aware of this and wrote about “the introduction of passages which called too much attention to themselves as poetry, and could not be dramatically justified . . . .”

He was also critical of the dramaturgy of the play as a whole:

There were two weaknesses which came to strike me as more serious still. The first was, that I had taken far too much of the strictly limited time allowed to a dramatist, in presenting a situation, and not left myself enough time, or provided myself with enough material, for developing it in action. I had written what was, on the whole, a good first act; except that for a first act it was much too long. When the curtain rises again, the audience is expecting, as it has a right to expect, that something is going to happen. Instead, it finds itself treated to a further exploration of the background: in other words, to what ought to have been given much earlier if at all. The beginning of the second act presents much the most difficult problem to producer and cast: for the audience’s attention is beginning to wander. And then, after what must seem to the audience an interminable time of preparation, the conclusion comes so abruptly that we are, after all, unready for it. This was an elementary fault in mechanics.

And he recognizes the difficulty of basing a contemporary play on a Greek tragedy, an approach that also bedeviled Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) in his play Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), also based on the Oresteia:

But the deepest flaw of all, was in a failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation. I should either have stuck closer to Aeschylus or else taken a great deal more liberty with his myth.

With a great deal of humor, Eliot describes in particular the problem of including a chorus like the chorus of an ancient Greek play, in his modern one:

One evidence of this is the appearance of those ill-fated figures, the Furies. . . . We tried every possible manner of presenting them. We put them on the stage, and they looked like uninvited guests who had strayed in from a fancy dress ball. We concealed them behind gauze, and they suggested a still out of a Walt Disney film. We made them dimmer, and they looked like shrubbery just outside the window. I have seen other expedients tried: I have seen them signaling from across the garden, or swarming onto the stage like a football team, and they are never right. They never succeed in being either Greek goddesses or modern spooks. But their failure is merely a symptom of the failure to adjust the ancient with the modern.

Okay, but the poetry in the play is superb, whether or not it’s a successful play. A character in it says:

What we have written is not a story of detection,
Of crime and punishment, but of sin and expiation. 

MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL

With Murder in the Cathedral we, and Eliot, and Eliot’s dramaturgy are all on solid ground. The play is Eliot’s most performed – it initially ran in London for about a year, and has had many productions since. It is particularly inviting to theater groups situated in churches (or cathedrals). Eliot wrote the play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935, basing it on events that had taken place in the cathedral of that town centuries before.

Thomas Beckett (c. 1119/1120-1170), former chancellor to King Henry II (1133-1189), once he became Archbishop of Canterbury, opposed the king’s strictures on the church in England, and four knights, acting, or believing they were acting, on the King’s orders, murdered Beckett in his cathedral on December 29, 1170.

Part 1 of the play sets a mood of spiritual turmoil, the elements of which will be familiar to readers of Eliot’s other plays, or of his poems. Taking advantage of the church setting, Eliot makes full use of chants, responsive recitations, and rituals. The verse style is modern, not archaic.

Beckett faces four Tempters (the same actors will play the murderous knights in Part 2), representing the temptations of safety, worldly glory, political opposition to the king, and – most dangerously – the temptation to be a great religious martyr. Beckett replies in among the most famous lines of the play:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason. 

In Part 2 Beckett’s priests try to shield him from the murderous knights, and at first succeed, but at last, the knights corner Beckett and kill him. Beckett dies in a state of clarity about the relation between the world and God that his priests can hardly understand.

Then Eliot does a brilliant, unexpected thing: he has the knights address the audience, explaining their actions and portraying themselves as ordinary people, doing what any of us would agree should have been done. (The play ends with a chorus of prayer.)

I have read that Eliot said he might have been inspired to give persuasive speeches to Beckett’s murderers by the example of Bernard Shaw, who, particularly in his play Saint Joan (1923), was careful to provide well-reasoned arguments for those who executed Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431).  

The last two pieces to be discussed – written before the plays we have discussed – have dramatic form but Eliot did not think of them as plays. However, they both show Eliot thinking about how drama and poetry might conjoin.

THE ROCK

Not a piece about a former wrestler who’s now a popular movie star, The Rock was a “dramatic pageant” written by Eliot, with music by Martin Shaw (1875-1958), and performed in London at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre for two weeks in 1934 to raise money for building new Anglican churches in the London suburbs.

The Complete Poems & Plays contains “Choruses from The Rock.” They are splendid poetry, remarkable examples of religious verse, with occasional speeches assigned to “Voice of the Unemployed,” “Workmen,” and so on. Not only are the choruses worthy in themselves, but it is fun to see T. S. Eliot writing dialogue for the proletariat.

SWEENEY AGONISTES

Sweeney is Eliot’s name for the worldly, thuggish, absolutely unspiritual male. “Agonistes” is a Greek word meaning “engaged in a struggle.” We have, then, an early example of a Greek theme (sort of) in a modern setting, something we will see throughout Eliot’s career as a playwright.

Sweeney Agonistes is unfinished, but the two published sections (“Fragment of a Prologue” and “Fragment of an Agon”) are sometimes performed as a one-act play. The first, slangy and rapid-fire, shows two women discussing men, and then meeting several examples of masculinity. The second features Sweeney and is not just slangy but musical, showing once again Eliot’s love of popular song, viewed askew:

Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
You don’t remember, but I remember,
Once is enough. 

SOME CONCLUSIONS

In discussing Eliot’s plays I have tried to rely minimally on outside sources, and to respond to the plays as I read them. Eliot’s reputation waxes and wanes, but, like so much in art, that is a matter of fashion, and I prefer to draw my own conclusions as much as possible – after all, everyone else does.

There are many aspects of Eliot’s life and work that lie outside this piece – for example, his personality, which some dislike; his personal religious practices, which are no business of mine; and the anti-Semitic passages in his writing, which however do not occur in his plays (or for that matter in the Four Quartets).

Reading the plays I learned that a continuous line runs through Eliot’s work. I had thought that he wrote poetry, then stopped and wrote verse plays instead. This is not so; as noted above, he wrote The Family Reunion before he wrote three of the Four Quartets, and major themes of his poetry continue straight through the plays.

Therefore we need to be careful of the often-delivered statement that Eliot’s plays were not as successful as his poems. In a way this is obviously true – his poems are landmarks of literature. But in a way it’s like saying that other mountains fail to be as high as Mt. Everest. They do; but they are no less mountains for that.

Eliot’s concerns motivate both his poetry and his plays, which comment on and inform each other. It is extremely difficult to be a leader in two different artistic forms (or in one). Not to have the same level of success in both can be expected. For that matter, to have at least two or three popular successes in five tries at writing plays is a record other playwrights can envy.

Eliot’s spiritual conclusions are not everyone’s. On the other hand, the drama is not exactly crowded with plays that tackle the spiritual dimension of life, assuming there is one, as serious material for drama. Eliot’s plays should at least stimulate thought about aspects of existence that aren’t often presented in the theater.

And I take my hat off to him for remaining a poet despite his being a writer with ideas and with firm convictions. He might have preached; instead he (usually) tries to stimulate. He (usually) leaves a great deal of room for us to think for ourselves.

As far as his dramaturgy is concerned, even when he wrote his plays he was beginning to look a little old-fashioned, an impression perhaps fostered by his public persona. I suspect that in fact the plays may be a bit ahead of their time – that as they become more and more “period pieces,” it will be easier to see them as basically experimental, and in many ways exciting.

In any case, he wanted to contribute something to art that he thought needed doing, and he worked at it a large part of his life, diligently and with important results. We should all do so well.

[I commented to Kirk that T. S. Eliot seems to have been his own critic. Kirk responded that he was, adding, “in all his criticism that I’ve read, he’s well aware that he’s anything but omniscient, and often funny about it.”  Kirk quoted (from “Five-Finger Exercises,” 1936): 

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With a bobtail cur
And a porpentine cat
And a wopsical hat
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
(Whether his mouth is open or shut). 

[I find Eliot’s unsparing self-portrait in verse very amusing—and stylistically reminiscent of the poetry he composed for Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.]

'FLEX'

 

[When I read the review of Candrice Jones’s FLEX in the New York Times on 25 July, I didn’t pay it much attention.  Despite Naveen Kumar’s praise (“a slam-dunk New York debut”; “the playwright Candrice Jones excels equally in sly, sitcom humor and in the swift-tongued rhythms of teenage and athletic talk”), it didn’t seem like a play that would hold my interest.

[I may have judged it on too little information.  The play, about to close its Off-Broadway première, may have more to offer, both dramatically and theatrically, than I understood.  On CBS 2 News at 6PM nine days later, Dave Carlin reported some facts about the Lincoln Center Theater production that piqued my attention, particularly that the cast plays an actual, unchoreographed basketball game on stage during the show.

[I’m posting four published articles on FLEX (which is sometimes written in upper and lower case letters, but seems to be officially written in all caps, so I’ll follow suit outside quotations) from different outlets.  Below is Carlin’s WCBS report, followed by an insider’s chronicle of the road the play took from Arkansas to New York City from American Theatre; a New York Times article on sports, especially basketball, on New York and regional stages; and an online review of the LCT production of FLEX.

[For the sake of the record, here’s the book on the play:

[FLEX was developed in the Berkeley (California) Repertory Theatre’s Ground Floor Residency between 19 June and 1 July 2018 and played the next year from 19 to 28 July at San Franciso’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival.

[Jones’s play was then selected for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s renowned Humana Festival of New American Plays for 2020.  The COVID pandemic shut-down was instituted in March of that year, however, two days before FLEX was scheduled to open at ATL.

[A reading at the Arkansas New Play Festival at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville on 22 August 2021 served as further development and a production at TheatreSquared between 29 June and 17 July 2022 was designated as the play’s première, along with a production at the Theatrical Outfit in Atlanta from 7 September to 2 October 2022.  FLEX has had multiple productions around the country since then, including its New York première.

[Under the direction of Lileana Blain-Cruz, FLEX opened for previews in the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, LCT’s 299-seat Off-Broadway house, on 23 June 2023; it had its press opening on 20 July and will close on 20 August. 

[Candrice Jones (b. 1981) is a Steinberg playwright and educator from Dermott, Arkansas, a small town with a population of 2,316 in Chicot County in the southeast corner of the state on the border with Mississippi.  (The Steinberg Playwright Award is given annually by the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust to up-and-coming American playwrights with distinctive voices.)  Dermott is the model for the play’s Plainnole (Plain Ol’?), Arkansas.

[Jones has been a fellow at the literary magazine Callaloo for poetry at Brown University and in London.  She’s also been a VONA Playwriting Fellow, and CalArts MFA Critical Studies recipient.  (VONA, or Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, is an arts organization founded in order to provide emerging writers of color with workshops and mentoring by established writers of color.)

[Jones’s primary goal, she declares, is to write love letters for and to women of the American South.  From 2014 to 2018, she produced Re-Imagining the Self, a ten-minute-play showcase hosted by Little Rock Central High National Historic Site and the Weekend Theater.  She’s the author of the full-length play Crackbaby (Wasserstein Prize Nomination [established in memory of playwright Wendy Wasserstein for an outstanding script by a young woman who hasn’t yet received national attention]).

[Jones has been a resident fellow at Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, and MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  She’s scheduled to be a resident playwright at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California, in the fall of 2024.  Jones was a 2019-20 Many Voices Fellow and 2020-21 Jerome Fellow at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis.  In 2022, she received the Celebrate! Maya Award.  Currently, Candrice Jones lives in Little Rock where she’s working on play and musical commissions.] 

“NEW PLAY ‘FLEX’ TAKES WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
FROM THE COURT TO THE STAGE”
by Dave Carlin 

[The article below was broadcast on CBS 2 News at 6PM on 3 August 2023.]

NEW YORK – High school women’s basketball is creatively brought to life in a new play at Lincoln Center.

It’s about ambition that can turn friendships foul, and the actors play the game for real on stage and must adapt the plot accordingly.

Summer youth basketball is getting propelled from the playgrounds and landing on a Lincoln Center stage in “Flex” by Candrice Jones.

“I’m having a ball on stage,” said Erica Matthews, who plays Starra Jones.

Starra is determined at all costs to rise from her high school team and go pro, but the arrival of new player, Sidney, played by Tamera Tomakili, threatens Starra.

“Sidney being there is basically her saying, you’re not going to the WNBA, and that is a hard pill for Starra to swallow,” Matthews said.

Starra plots a secret betrayal that threatens to unravel the team.

As the teammates deal with friction, a hidden romance and teen pregnancy, the actors multitask with lots of running, jumping, passing and shooting.

Depending on how the games on stage go, the script changes, and there are two endings.

But win or lose at the end, the play’s message is the same.

“This sport has brought us together because it is a communal thing, and I think that is the heart of the story, is that, at the end of the day, we need community, we need to be together in order to make kind of everyone’s dream come true,” Tomakili said.

“She still learns that no matter what, your journey is your jurney,” Matthews said. “Learning to play with the team, it isn’t always about you.”

Turning the actors into athletes was basketball consultant Amber Batchelor, of the group “Ladies Who Hoop” [“a nonprofit organization that empowers women of all ages and fosters community through the game of basketball”].

“Jumping into the theater world and being connected to this project has been the thrill of my life,” she said. “Especially some of the character work between Starra and Sidney, and those one-on-one games was really fun to choreograph . . . [.] I think each and every one of them were surprised at how quickly when you just get kind of the basics and fundamentals.”

Batchelor added, “We’re in this amazing time now, there’s a real evolution of the women’s game – not just basketball, but women’s sports as a whole . . . [.] You’re going to see a lot of women playing at all ages.”

The action on a real court or a theatrical one has the power to bring you to your feet, cheering.

“Flex” plays through Aug. 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

*  *  *  *
“‘FLEX’: TAKING THE LADY TRAIN FROM THE ARKANSAS DELTA TO LINCOLN CENTER”
by Kim Euell 

[Kim Euell’s chronicle appeared in the Theatre Communication Group’s monthly magazine American Theatre on 12 July 2023.  As the title indicates, it traces the path of Candrice Jones’s play from background in Dermott, Arkansas, to the stage of the Mitze E. Newhouse Theater at New York City’s Lincoln Center.]

Candrice Jones’s new play about a Southern girls’ basketball team has come a long way, but it hasn’t been a layup.

Flex, Candrice Jones’s play about an ambitious girl’s high school basketball team in rural Arkansas, is on the move. In the past year, the team known as the Lady Train has journeyed from its co-world premiere at Northwest Arkansas’s Obie-winning TheatreSquared and at Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit, and now to New York City’s Lincoln Center Theater, where it’s currently in previews, to open officially on July 20. Under the inspired direction of LCT resident director Lileana Blain-Cruz, the Lady Train’s New York debut feels almost miraculous, given the blindsiding bumps it hit along the way.

Jones’s play is set in the year 1997, the inaugural year of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). This momentous event beams a beacon of hope to a group of young Arkansas women, who see winning their state tournament as a ticket out of a dead-end existence in a town where the options are working in a spice factory or at local prisons, or enlisting in the military. But before these young women can get to state, they must overcome a formidable obstacle—i.e., a star player is pregnant, and the coach does not allow pregnant girls to play.

Flex’s developmental journey began when Candrice brought an early draft into a playwriting workshop I conducted for Voices of the Nation (a.k.a. VONA) in the summer of 2017. VONA produces the country’s only multi-genre writing conference specifically for writers of color. Our dramaturgical collaboration continued after the workshop into the following summer, when Flex was among the roster of plays developed at Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency. In 2019, Flex was at the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival prior to being selected for the 2020 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

In Louisville, the cast worked with a professional coach on polishing their basketball skills (as they would do years later in New York), in addition to rehearsing their roles with the play’s director. But two days prior to Flex’s anticipated world premiere, ATL suspended all performances due to COVID-19. Given the intense rehearsal schedule and the demands of tech, the reality of the enveloping pandemic had not penetrated the productions’ bubble—until it burst. When the cast gathered on Mar. 18, 2020, at a downtown Louisville restaurant, to celebrate director Delicia Turner-Sonnenberg’s birthday, the celebration felt more like a wake.

This shutdown was especially hard on Candrice, as the Humana premiere would have marked her first full production as a playwright. As the months passed, she busied herself writing and developing new scripts. Eventually she was contacted by Dexter Singleton, director of play development at Fayetteville’s TheatreSquared. He wished to develop the script at the Arkansas New Play Festival, and, if all went well, to premiere the play the following summer (with Turner-Sonnenberg back as director).

Arkansas is ranked the second poorest state in the nation, just behind neighboring Mississippi. So I was somewhat taken aback upon arriving at the award-winning modern architectural facility that houses TheatreSquared. Artistic director Robert Ford and executive director Martin Miller had leveraged the resources to build a stunning wish-list facility with two state-of-the-art performance spaces on the ground level, and a flexible rehearsal and performance space upstairs. Remarkably, TheatreSquared managed to continue producing a full season even as the pandemic raged.

On the day of the new-play festival’s staged reading of Flex in summer 2021, it played to a large, enthusiastic (masked) audience in attendance. At the conclusion of the reading’s talkback, one audience member shouted, “Let’s take this train all the way to New York!” Prophetic words indeed.

Fast forward to the spring 2023. As part of the dramaturgical research for the Lincoln Center Theater production, I’m taking a road trip to the playwright’s hometown of Dermott, Ark., to see how it informed her play. The plan is to rendezvous with Candrice in Little Rock, then set off to Dermott the following morning. Candrice calls to remind me that Fayetteville, which is a well-resourced university town, is “a bubble,” warning me of “sundown towns” I will be passing through, where I should not stop under any circumstances. “Travel with a full tank of gas,” she intones. I am heading out of the Ozarks into the Deep South.

Along the freeway I spot some curious signs. One points out the road to the town of Toad Suck. Large billboards feature Donald Trump, standing alongside a uniformed military officer, warning against the use of electronic balloting machines. (They all say “President Trump,” as though he is still in the White House. Time warp.)

One of the reasons I feel compelled to visit Dermott is because I have been told repeatedly that the Arkansas Delta, where Flex is set, is nothing like Fayetteville, my only Arkansas point of reference. I am also aware that major cultural icons hail from the Delta region: Sister Rosetta Tharpe (whose music is featured in the production), Johnny Cash, Basketball Hall of Famer Scottie Pippin, and playwright Endesha Ida Mae Holland.

During my time in Dermott (pop. 1973 and shrinking), Candrice drives us to many of the locations referenced in the play. We pass the Piggly-Wiggly on our way into town, and we drive by the Morris-Booker Community College, now permanently closed. There are two prisons in the area, a federal and a state facility. We drive in search of dirt basketball courts, only to discover that they have now all been paved over.

Having read that the Delta encompasses the state’s highest concentration of poverty, I quickly deduce that rural poverty does not necessarily resemble urban poverty. There are no unhoused people and no panhandlers to be seen. But the markers of prosperity and development that were so visible in Fayetteville are glaringly absent. Motels, grocery stores, and restaurants are in short supply. Abandoned houses are noticeable, their roofs caving in from lack of upkeep.

On the plus side, the Delta is a treat for the senses, as the soothing sounds of crickets and chirping birds fill the air. Heading out of downtown, I inhale the smell of the rich, dark soil visible in the wide open fields under limitless blue skies. We in the Dirty South, y’all! This is the region that inspired a Kesselring Award-winning play.

On our final day we visited Dermott’s public school, whose campus encompasses kindergarten through grade 12. Candrice’s entire senior class comprised 25 students. Entering through the front doors, we pass through hallways lined with glass cases full of trophies. The gymnasium walls are adorned with individual life-sized banners of uniformed male and female basketball players. Groups of eighth graders file in for physical education and immediately begin shooting baskets.

Candrice engages with a group of girls, asking them their family names, then telling them whose aunt or cousin she played on the team with. While this is happening, one of the girls begins nonchalantly spinning the basketball on the tip of her index finger, Harlem Globetrotter-style. This is when it fully dawns on me how deeply ingrained basketball culture is in this town.

For our visit, we stay in the gracious two-story home where Candrice and her siblings grew up. Railroad tracks border the expansive backyard. It is this proximity that inspired Candrice to name the team in the play the Lady Train. An apt name it turned out to be for the journey that was to come.

Candrice has done a masterful job of maximizing every opportunity to further develop the script. At TheatreSquared, when the final shot that determined the outcome of the championship game was taken, the stage went to black. When the lights came up audiences saw the Lady Train holding their trophy.

At Lincoln Center Theater, by contrast, the audience follows the championship game action quarter by quarter as though they are at courtside. And when the final shot is taken, hit or miss, it determines how the play ends for that performance. When I attended one of the two performances that ended with a “loss,” I was impressed to see that the losing ending was equally if not more moving than the “win.” 

Blain-Cruz is an ideal director for this play because of her highly physical approach to staging. She begins each rehearsal with movement and utilizes bumping dance music as an energizer when needed. “I do not underestimate the amount of focus, concentration, and stamina that this show takes—bravo!” she told the actors after their first full run-through.

Flex may be best understood as Candrice’s love letter to women of the rural South. One homage that would be recognizable only to residents of the Delta is the story that the Lady Train’s coach tells about winning the state championship with only four girls on the court. Candrice told me that this is in fact a true story—a feat accomplished by Gloria Harris, legendary coach of the Delta Lady Pirates.

In addition to basketball, the music in Flex provides another portal of entry into the world of the play. Songs like Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” Kurtis Blow’s “Basketball,” Aliyah’s “Are You That Somebody,” and Xscape’s “Just Kickin’ It” transport me back to the ’90s, when I joined the artistic staff of the Tony-winning Hartford Stage in Connecticut. I accepted the position of director of play development to help open the door for underrepresented writers in American theatre. (I knew of only one other person of color in a similar position at a mainstream theatre at the time). Back then, the plays being produced by writers of color in mainstream theatres at the time were typically works that would not challenge the subscriber audience’s assumptions about minority cultures. I knew there were much more impactful stories that were being overlooked and writers who were falling through the cracks.

Working closely at Hartford Stage with then artistic director Mark Lamos and resident director Bart Sher (currently resident director at Lincoln Center Theater) we succeeded in attracting the audience that every regional theatre claimed they wanted—one that reflected the diversity of its community. We had all ages, races and backgrounds on our stages and in our seats. I’ve often referred to my time at Hartford as my “Camelot” moment. And like the legendary Camelot, it didn’t last.

Riding the Lady Train into Lincoln Center has been a particularly satisfying experience for me, as it bookends the work I started at Hartford Stage. Candrice Jones exemplifies a compellingly authentic voice, staging facets of Black Southern life not widely seen on American stages until now. I doubt that this production could have happened as recently as five years ago. For one thing, Blain-Cruz, who chose to direct it, has only been a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater since 2020. As in the play, the winds of change are blowing. Let us see how far they can take us.

[Kim Euell is an Ashland/Bay Area-based playwright, dramaturg, and educator who teaches theater and film courses at the University of Southern Oregon.  She’s the co-dramaturg for FLEX at Lincoln Center Theater.]

*  *  *  *
“PLAYWRIGHTS WITH HOOP DREAMS”
by Sopan Deb 

[The article below appeared in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the New York Times of 23 July 2023.]

In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall” [New York Theatre Workshop (Off-Broadway), 31 July-21 August 2023], the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” [Manhattan Theatre Club (Off-Broadway; co-produced with Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago), 16 May-18 June 2023], the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.

Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.

While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)

“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”

For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.

“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.

And basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” [Booth Theatre (Broadway), 4 November 2018-27 January 2019] and “Ain’t No Mo’” [Joseph Papp Public Theater (Off-Broadway), 27 March-5 May 2019; Belasco Theatre (Broadway), 1-23 Dec 2022].

“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”

In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.

“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”

Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.

“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”

Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.

“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”

After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.

“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”

Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.

At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)

As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)

Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”

“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”

“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”

Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” [Longacre Theatre (Broadway), 11 April-12 May 2012] explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones” [Walter Kerr Theatre (Broadway), 14 December 2011-8 January 2012], inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap” [Atlantic Theater Company (Off-Broadway), 23 May-24 June 2018] also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.

Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” [Catastrophic Theatre, 6 April-13 May 2018] that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.

“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.

Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees” [46th Street Theatre/Adelphi Theatre (original Broadway première), 5 May 1955-12 October 1957]. Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out” [Joseph Papp Public Theater (Off-Broadway), 5 September-24 November 2002; Walter Kerr Theatre (Broadway première), 27 February 2003-4 January 2004], about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year.  In 2019, “Toni Stone” [Roundabout Theatre Company (Off-Broadway), 20 June-11 August 2019], written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone [1921-96], who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues [25 April 1953].

Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi” [Circle in the Square Theatre (Broadway), 21 October 2010-22 May 2011], a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi [1913-70], ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky” [Winter Garden Theatre (Broadway), 13 March-17 August 2014], the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.

But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand.

[Sopan Deb is a basketball writer and a contributor to the Culture section of the New York Times. Before joining the Times, he covered Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for CBS News.]

 *  *  *  *
“REVIEW: IN FLEX, FRIENDSHIP FOULS CONSUME
A HIGH SCHOOL WOMEN’S BASKETBALL TEAM”
by Hayley Levitt 

[Hayley Levitt’s review of FLEX was posted on the website TheaterMania on 20 July 2023.]

Candrice Jones’s nostalgic play about teenage hope and ambition makes its New York premiere at Lincoln Center Theater.

It’s 1998 in Plainnole, Arkansas, the WNBA has just entered the zeitgeist, and the members of the Lady Train high school basketball team have gone to extreme measures to keep their starting lineup (and hopeful futures) intact: No sex until they bring home the state championship.

It’s a very Lysistrata opening to Candrice Jones’s sports-centric play Flex — now at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater — but the comparisons end there. For one thing, the celibacy pact has been breached before the show even begins (the cycle of senior athletes in provincial Plainnole being sidelined by unwanted pregnancy can’t be so easily broken). And more importantly, the pact has nothing to do with boys. Sure, it’s the boys who get these talented young Black women pregnant, but the players’ loyalties are to one another and their ambitions are their own.

The internal struggle between loyalty and ambition is the central conflict for Starra, played with unshakable confidence and remarkable athleticism by Erica Matthews. She’s the star(ra) of the Lady Train, but her supremacy is threatened by Sidney (an amusingly brash performance by Tamera Tomakili), a California transplant who is presumed glamorous upon arrival— and not entirely unfairly, considering that her Division 1 college scouts have followed her to the boonies of Arkansas.

It’s an opportunity Starra (whose late mother also lost out on recruitment opportunities) would do just about anything to have herself. And she takes anything shockingly far, much to the chagrin of her other teammates — particularly her sweet-natured and extremely religious cousin Cherise (a hilarious Ciara Monique whose performance resists trite archetypes). It’s a move so outrageous, it almost overshadows the other central story line: the collective pursuit of an abortion for their teammate April (an excellent Brittany Bellizeare), which, in between horrific conversations about sexual trauma and the dearth of access to healthcare in the South (Jones’s version of 1998 is looking 2023 dead in the face), turns into a charming road trip comedy (Renita Lewis, as the queer-coded Donna, delivers some of the show’s best deadpan comedy from the driver’s seat of set designer Matt Saunders’s jigsaw puzzle of a car).

Flex trades in the same camaraderie and female friendship that made A League of Their Own a beacon for every female athlete, with doses of teen drama and ’90s nostalgia to lock in the allegiance of every elder millennial (costume designer Mika Eubanks’s vests, baggy button-ups, and bucket hats are spot-on). In stories like these, characters are the key to success, and characters are clearly Jones’s strength as a writer. For each of these girls, the stakes feel high and authentic to this slice of American life — but director Lileana Blain-Cruz maintains a levity throughout that all but ensures a classic happy ending at a championship game where life lessons coalesce into a poetic expression of teamwork. [For the novices in sports-ball vernacular, the Flex offense demands a lot of passing and takes players out of their traditional roles. You can see where this metaphor is headed.]

Flex certainly invites comparison to Sarah DeLappe’s successful ensemble play, The Wolves, which followed the complex politics of a girls’ soccer team. However, where The Wolves buried tension and darkness beneath a shell of inane chatter, Flex wears its drama on its sleeve and cushions it all in the safety of a traditional story arc. There’s also the added buffer of Coach Francine (Christiana Clark, mastering a coach’s cadence of tough love), who, despite her unfair blanket rule against playing pregnant girls, takes on the uncomplicated persona of “stable adult” — the kind of cozy character perhaps better suited for a television miniseries than a play that aims for complexity.

The most tension-generating part of Flex is the actual basketball that Blain-Cruz has her cast play onstage (Saunders turns the Newhouse Theater into a fully functional basketball court). Plot points depend on actors hitting shots — particularly Matthews, who incredibly sinks a three-pointer to button one of her Act 1 monologues (if you were wondering, The Wolves had zero soccer-ing). It’s one of the riskiest moves I’ve ever seen attempted in live theater and the payoff is an entire audience holding its collective breath and celebrating the ecstasy of victory. With that kind of pressure, even an expected ending gets an infusion of suspense.

[Hayley Levitt is a New York-based theater journalist with experience in Broadway and Off-Broadway criticism, interviews and profiles, feature writing, and reporting for both camera and print.]