Jason Miller’s actual ashes rest in a silver urn on the set of the revival of the play he wrote in 1972, “That Championship Season,” placed there by his son Jason Patric, who plays Tom the drunk in a five-member cast that includes Kiefer Sutherland and Chris Noth.
Miller was 32 years old when he wrote the play, about the 20th reunion of a championship high school basketball team, and there is some irony in his having composed a drama about a group of men whose moment of glory had long since passed. The play won for Miller a Tony Award for Best Play and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That same year, Miller was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as the troubled priest in The Exorcist.
Miller died of a heart attack in a bar in Scranton in 2001, the last three decades of his life no match for his early success.
It helps to know about this history – and to spot that urn – to experience the kind of resonance that Patric, who owns the rights to his father’s play, surely meant for a new audience to feel, as the men gather at their coach’s house in nostalgia and break apart in drunken bitterness.
On the surface, the reason for the hostility is betrayal. Phil (Chris Noth) has slept with the wife of his former team-mate George (Jim Gaffigan). George is the mayor of the town, and Phil, who is a rich strip-miner, bankrolled him in the previous election, but now, to protect his interests, is planning to abandon him in favor of his opponent, the more likely winner in the next. James (Kiefer Sutherland), George’s campaign manager, tells George about the affair, but he too hopes to betray George…and get Phil to support him for mayor.
Beneath the surface, though, is a story of a world that is no longer theirs for the taking.
The main problem with “That Championship Season” is that the timeless story of lost glories and regrets is too rooted in the particular time in which it was written.
“Progress?” the coach (Brian Cox) says more than once. “Nothing changes but the date.” But the coach is clearly meant to be wrong about this, as he is about everything, especially his anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic rants. Things do change. Audiences in 1972 were surely meant to see through the characters’ narrow-mindedness, corruption and self-delusion, and feel good for having done so. But when Coach (as he’s called) sings arias of praise to Senator Joseph McCarthy and Father Coughlin, the deck now just seems stacked. The red-baiting senator of the 1950’s may still have a handful of defenders, but he and especially the anti-Semitic radio priest of the 1930’s have been judged by history, and dismissed by the public, as bigots and buffoons. Coach, in other words, is a complete schmuck; we get it; how is this interesting?
Crafted differently, the play might have been taken now as a period piece, with its glimpse into 1970’s small town quid-pro-quo life and the then-resistance to the nascent environmental movement. But it is not just the characters in “That Championship Season” who live in 1972; the playwright seems stuck there, arguing on the cusp of changing times for issues we now take as a given.
It is possible that playwrights like David Mamet and Neil LaBute were influenced by Miller’s depiction of coarse male camaraderie, but Mamet et al’s foul-mouthed poetry now overshadows the more conventional cadences of Miller’s play, taking the shock out of it. Still, if Jason Miller the playwright may not completely hold up, Jason Miller the actor knew how to create meaty roles, and the cast in this first Broadway revival largely takes advantage of them. To the extent that they have star power, it works in their favor – these basketball players saw themselves as stars. Patric does a good job as Tom, James’ alcoholic brother, who utters zingers, reveals the reason why he thinks even the glory days weren’t so glorious, and in one Spider-Man-like moment falls down a long staircase. Chris Noth, best-known as Mr. Big in “Sex and the City” and now as the Chicago pol in “The Good Wife,” demonstrates in his role as Phil, a compulsive Lothario, that New York audiences would profit by seeing him more frequently on the stage. The real revelation here is at-first unrecognizable Kiefer Sutherland, making his Broadway debut as James, a character unlike any you’ve seen him perform before — a stressed-out milquetoast of a junior high school principal lashing out in frustrated ambition.
That Championship Season
At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater through May 29, 2011
Written by Jason Miller; directed by Gregory Mosher; sets by Michael Yeargan; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Peter Kaczorowski; sound by Scott Lehrer; fight director, Rick Sordelet; Cast: Brian Cox (Coach), Jim Gaffigan (George Sikowski), Chris Noth (Phil Romano), Jason Patric (Tom Daley) and Kiefer Sutherland (James Daley). Running time: Two hours with one 15-minute intermission. Ticket prices: $61.50 to $129.
