ATP's King James: The Agon of Human Connection

Alberta Theatre Projects is staging King James at the Martha Cohen Theatre from the 25th of February to March 16th. The play, written by Rajiv Joseph, explores the bond between two friends, their love for basketball, and their cherishment of LeBron James. The play starts off with Shawn looking to buy some season basketball tickets from Matt, which eventually leads to them developing an endearing friendship. Shawn wants to be a writer, and Matt wants to be a sports bar owner. They become an integral part of each other's lives and families, they offer help and succor to each other, but like the background context of basketball, also compete with each other. They are not content to remain passively engaged in the structure of their friendship but are seeking an active mode of interpersonal engagement with one another. Basketball, and sports in general, serve as an interface for individuals to engage in shared meaning-making. It is easy to deride the cultural fascination with sports as equivalent to being an opiate of the masses- a civic narcotic that blunts serious social action and induces false consciousness. There have been more than a few writers (Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer amongst others) that have seen it, sports, as an extension of the culture industry; a constellation of commercially commodified practices that repress the emancipatory consciousness of the collective. The argument is that modern-day sports reinforce the surrogate collectivity of the civic mass, whereas civil society was one held together by organic institutions that bound communities together in a cohesive whole. In an increasingly atomized society, we have only the manufactured identities of sporting rivalries to hold us together. There are also the more extreme exemplifications of what has been termed biopolitical control, where sports have been mobilized by totalitarian regimes to induce mass regimentation. Through these regimes, sporting ambitions are ideologically repurposed to become forms of paramilitary education, where the body is steeled to advance all sorts of revolutionary aspirations. Whether it is the insidious practices of the culture industry in North America or the overt biopolitical control of the human body by authoritarian regimes, both weaponize sports to unify the human experience through social engineering. That being said, can all forms of the modern spectacle of sports be considered to be expression of false consciousness? This might be too reductive, far too reductive. Like all forms of human expression, there might be more going on here. Johan Huizinga’s (Dutch Cultural Theorist) Homo Ludens (the playing human) is particularly salient here, where play and sports are seen as magic circles. Sports, through this concept, is seen as a site for the exploration of ritualistic camaraderie, a realm for social experimentation and controlled risk taking. Rivalry and trust are explored without the rigid consequences of external life. In the magic circle of sports reality is self-constrained and constructed, the rules of the game paradoxically enable creativity and freedom. It is a fluid space that abounds with existential irony, where fans adapt roles but also remain aware of their detachment from them. We submit to the arbitrary rules of sports but within them we nonetheless feel free. The struggles we experience with sports feel, both, artificial yet meaningful. Does this mean that human freedom and significance emerge from our engagement with these rules and not from the absence of them? If certain cultural theorists see the spectacle of sports as life denying, there are others who see it as life affirming, where existence is emphatically guaranteed not through the cynical derision of sporting culture but in the understanding that existence is fundamentally a being-in-the world, where meaning is not found in the abstract dismissal of all things coarse and low, but in the embodied participation in structured engagements that reveal our bodily connection to reality. For Martin Heidegger (German philosopher), it is a strange freedom that would seek to express itself in isolation from the arbitrary given-ness of the world, because such a conception of freedom would be one in name only. Freedom is paradoxically, both, movement within and against the given-ness of the world. Seen through this lens, sports are a playing ground for human beings to negotiate the finitude of personal agency through struggle and play. Basketball in King James serves as a motif for understanding how interpersonal rivalries sustain and deepen bonds. The note from the director for this production states that sports can help us find common ground. This of course is true but is only half the story. Friendships and communities also exist as structured rivalries, each employing modes of adversarial reasoning and play in exploring their collective and individual aspirations. Such modes of reasoning are not necessarily corrosive or destructive, they are part of the ongoing negotiation of identity and equality. Shawn & Matt are two individuals with different histories and different identities yet are drawn to each through the agonistic (spirit of struggle) energy of sports. Their friendship is an ongoing negotiation of where they see themselves, how they see each other and how they would like to be seen by each other. Like sports, being seen a certain way comes with active participation and struggle with and in the world. There is the feeling that things are not quite right with the world and consequently the feeling there is something not quite right with who we are. How do we resolve this? There is of course no final point of resolution, no Archimedean point where the complexity of everything in our personal and social world is revealed to us in a single vision, but rather like Shawn & Matt comes to us iteratively through struggles, competitions and risks that are constitutive of life. Both characters push each other, we see this in the first act where Matt asks probing questions, asking why Shawn pursues writing as a part time hobby, why he is who he is and what the historical context behind his passion in basketball is. Matt takes conversational risks, he embodies a Socratic energy, one that will not take facile assertions at face value. The relationship is immediately dynamic, not static, these are characters who have conversations that are not trite but are modes of revealing, they are compelled to disclose something deeper about each other. I have often felt it very strange for sports fans to be seen as an unthinking and uncritical mass (usually emanating from the proponents of high culture). For example, Matt's continual assertions throughout the play that 'the problem with America is...' suggests a cognitive acuity, that in some ways, is parallel to Hamlet's assertions that 'something is rotten in the state of Denmark'. Both statements suggest that, for each character, civilization carries with it the seeds of its own systemic decay. Though the play does not expressly deconstruct political themes, it puts paid to the notion that sports fans do not possess political acumen. In the second half of the play, Matt makes a detonative remark that indicates that there are unresolved tensions between them. The statement could be construed to be overlaid with racial overtones-the play adeptly does not tell us exactly what the statement is meant to express, but it becomes a linguistic canvas for the characters and the audience to interrogate the complex ethnic and racial anxieties that compose the unspoken tensions within civil society. Is Matt's statement indicative of his own sense of inferiority with his lack of socio-economic mobility? is this a class issue or a race issue? is it the resignation of someone who has encountered the personal limits of his own creative agency? Or is it a form of cognitive dissonance where Matt struggles to reconcile his admiration for success with a resentment for those who achieve it through terms he cannot really control or understand. Who knows. I do not want to give away the end of the play, but it is worth asking what price we are willing to pay to renounce personal relationships because of political differences? Some opinions are much more virulent than others, and demand emphatic counter responses, granted, but I wondered during the play, whether (in some cases) it is not ideology that divides but rather the underlying struggle for existential agency that pushes these differences to the top of our conversations. Whether these differences are proxies for deeper interpersonal agon and rivalries that abound through our friendships, the struggle for personal recognition and the assertion of self-hood. True to the existentialist analysis of Jean-Paul Sarte (French Philosopher), what might be as problematic as false consciousness is bad faith- where people camouflage their own personal insecurities behind ideological facades, rendering a personal crisis into a conflict that weaponizes ideology. This is not to say that the systemic issues of our time are not real, and do not deserve structural attention, they certainly are, and they certainly do. That admission though should not obfuscate the very real inter-personal fact that many times we are quite willing to subject others around us to political struggle sessions- not to advance a legitimate cause but to indulge in schadenfreude (relishing the humiliation of others) and to engage in rhetorical one-upmanship.

The production - Diana Reyes as the House DJ electrified the space with sonic power and verve. Brian Dudkiewicz created an interesting set, the bar in the first half and the store in the second half had interesting nuances. Louise Guinand's lighting in the first act did the job. The actor playing Matt plodded along in the first act, but after the first 10 minutes the performance became very predictable. The vocalic cadence that he developed for his character was a sort of terminal whine, a plaintive and rising draw out note that created a sense of petulance. This is an appropriate extension of a character that seems to have a chip on his shoulder, but at the level of execution it is too drawn out and renders the nuance of the text to a uniform refrain. He came back stronger in the second half, his last scene with Shawn was excellent and showed that there was more to his performance than he was showing us in the first act. I expect him to get stronger the longer the production runs. The actor playing Shawn had false starts and stops in the first half, the chemistry between the characters in the first half was not entirely on point. I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that the lines were not driven by any dynamic action, the conversations in the first half take place in a bar. There is a lot to do in that space. Conversations, no matter how trivial or absorbing, are almost always punctuated by minor actions- getting a drink of water, eating something, cleaning glasses, etc. These are the minor acts of everyday life that ground dialogue in authenticity. When the conversations on stage are bereft of this, it just looks like a well-prepared reading, and that is not what we are there to see. We are there to see life. In some exchanges, both actors are stood in near-perfect alignment at opposite ends of the stage, facing out towards the audience. This can be effective sometimes but overused as it was in the first half of this play, it made the blocking feel rigid and extremely predictable. Also, for a friendship that becomes increasingly dynamic and personal as the play progresses there is hardly any physical touch (pointed out to me by a friend who was with me), we only see this at certain moments in the play. That lack of physical interaction seems incongruous with the depth and context of the friendship that we are being asked to believe in. These issues were intuitively or consciously addressed in the second half, we see more interaction with the set, we see more dynamic movement and we see the Shawn & Matt start to find a performative resonance that lifts the production out of the ailments of the first half. Shawn came back very strong in the second half, delivering a charismatic performance that conveyed the nuances and complexity of the character. His performance lifted Matt, helping to unlock salient dimensions of the character with greater confidence. True to a tense basketball game, where a team runs a sizeable deficit in the first half and has to find a way to re-muster self-belief to push through in the second half, this production came back strong. I did not see the strong imprint of a creative Auteur in this production, this is not always a bad thing, sometimes too strong an imprint can smudge out the carefully balanced detail in a production. Whatever style was employed, it works well enough for this production.

I was very conflicted in regard to a rating for this production. Opening nights are always tough, and while the production struggled to find its footing in the first half, the second half exhibited sterling execution. The ailments of the first act can be addressed with slight adjustments and application, the issues are not terminal, but left as they are may alienate audiences from investing into the poignant drama of the second half. Also, I am seriously impressed by the fact that ATP took a risk with this production. Putting up a sports themed play is never an easy decision- not everyone has an appreciation for basketball- and having the confidence to put up something that may not cater to the broadest audience possible but trusts the strength of its narrative is admirable. Usually, I am done with a production in the first half if it fails to reveal the drama's emotional kernel, and the actors offer us nothing but a mechanical spectacle (no soul, no life, no vulnerability). Thankfully, that structural malaise is nowhere to be seen in this production.

Much like the sport that it uses as a central motif, it is still struggling to find its rhythm and self-confidence through struggle and adaptation- this is parallel to the ebb and flow, push and pull, of self-belief that binds us to our friendships. I expect for this production, in its Calgary outing, to reach that moment; the structure is sound, and the talent is palpable. Hence, the predictive rating.

Rating - 7.5