Both New York’s basketball fans and theater fans are experiencing suspense and excitement at exactly the same time, which makes this feel the right time to revisit some shared history. Below, a look back at theater about basketball.

That Championship Season
Broadway’s Booth Theater, 1972-1974. Revived 2011

Jason Miller’s play takes place during the 20th reunion of a championship high school basketball team, for whom the game was their moment of glory in lives that have turned bitter with disillusionment and betrayal. The play won both the Tony Award for best play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
When the play was revived on Broadway in 2011 (as I pointed out in my review) the playwright’s ashes were in an urn on the set, placed there by his son Jason Patric, who was in the new five-member cast. Miller had 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.

Lysistrata Jones
Judson Memorial Church, then Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theater, 2011

Librettist Douglas Carter Beane and songwriter Lewis Flinn  took Aristophanes’ bawdy anti-war satire and turned it into a teen musical comedy: A group of cheerleaders refuse to have sex with a team of college basket players until they start winning games.  The musical was originally staged in an actual basketball court. It moved to Broadway, and lasted thirty performances. (My Broadway review.)

Magic/Bird
Broadway’s Longacre Theater, 2012

This play about the rivalry and then friendship between basketball stars Magic Earvin Johnson and Larry Bird, was put together by the same team (producers, playwright, director) that brought “Lombardi”to Broadway. That play about the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi lasted about seven months at Circle in the Square, longer than any previous play about football. “Magic/Bird” ran just 38 performances. The show partnered with the National Basketball Association, and enlisted the play’s real-life subjects to do promotion and publicity. But that might have been part of the problem, as I explained my review, “Magic/Bird” seems to have been inspired by little more than a marketing strategy. My review concludes:
How does “Magic/Bird” solve the problem of presenting the actual sport of basketball on the stage? Not very effectively: The actors dribble a little, shoot a basket here and there; there is some video footage, as well as a couple of fancy effects involving lighting and slow motion. But all in all, there was more of a sense of the actual game of basketball – the kinetic excitement of it — in the choreography of the musical “Lysistrata Jones.”
“Magic/Bird” is the last basketball play to have had a run on Broadway. The others since then have been Off or Off-Off Broadway

King Liz
Second Stage Theatre Uptown, 2015

Karen Pittman portrayed the head of the “NBA division of the top sports agency in the country,” who tries to woo a 19-year-old (Jeremie Harris), who is an extraordinary player – with a criminal record. My review

The Half-God of Rainfall
ART, 2023

Inua Ellams’s epic poem tells the story of a Nigerian-born demigod son of Zeus who becomes an NBA All Star,

Flex
Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi Newhouse, 2023

Candice Jones’ play about a high school basketball team of Black female players in Plainnole, Arkansas aiming to win the state championship of 1998, involved basketball playing by the ensemble that felt somewhere between authentic court moves (both the playwright and director Lileana Blain-Cruz reportedly played high school basketball) and lively choreography. My review

KS6: Small Forward
La MaMa,2024
Katsiaryna Snytsina, a globe-trotting professional basketball player and Olympian, portrayed herself in her remarkable true story: She joined other athletes in a letter protesting the dictatorship in her native Belarus of Alexander Lukashenko, which forced her into exile in London, where she thrived on a new team, the London Lions, became an outspoken activist, and came out publicly as a lesbian. (The title is composed of her initials, the number on her uniform, and her basketball position.) Produced by Belarus Free Theater, the show was an inventive mix of basketball moves and avant-garde theatricality. My review.