In Inua Ellams’ new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play rumbling games of basketball in the sky. For Candrice Jones’ “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scrapping through rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball with a crumpled piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of NBA star LeBron James.
Basketball isn’t just on New York City playgrounds this summer. Hoop dreams also play on stage, highlighting a theatrical, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.
Although basketball is not as popular as, for example, American football, its cultural reach exceeds that of other American team sports because its players are among the most recognizable to the public. (Three of the world’s 10 highest-paid athletes, when endorsements and other off-field endeavors are included, according to Forbes, are NBA 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 Rain.” “It’s like an embodied conflict. Great performers carry it out. When you watch Broadway, it’s like watching NBA performers.”
For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport because so many international stars play in the NBA, such as Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets, who is Serbian, and Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks, who is from Greece.
“It draws from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a truly important athletic pursuit around the world.,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just finished its run at the New York City Center.
And the proliferation of basketball in pop culture — including the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has permeated the theater space as well. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the NBA in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”
“Even if one didn’t play on a team or didn’t play organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” said Jones, who wrote “Flex,” in a recent interview. “You go to any hood or any small town, someone made a basketball goal.”
With the casting of “Flex,” which is in previews at Lincoln Center TheaterThe 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 played on stage to feel authentic.
“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different types of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role they’re playing and how they’re playing it. And I think that lends itself to theater.”
Jones’ play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, aligned with the WNBA’s second year. So as the audition process progressed, actors were asked to dribble, shoot and layup for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about the performance: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.
“There’s kind of an ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said of the sport. “Like a group of actors playing together, a group of basketball players playing together. Together they create the event.”
A few 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. This may have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself has a basketball hoop hanging from the back, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play that basketball teams run, and the staged routine features several play opportunities.
“Something is really strict. It’s real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s fun, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling a ball is really dribbling a ball. We’re not doing the idea of dribbling the ball.
After a recent outing at a New York Liberty game, actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the fictional team’s 17-year-old point guard, said that watching the players reminds him 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 really perform on a stage and the way the audience moves around them, the way they clapping, it’s basically storytelling.”
Downtown at New York Theater Workshop, Ellam’s “The Half-God of Rain,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek goddess named Demi who becomes the NBA’s biggest star, is in previews and set to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with the down-to- earth issues, such as teenage pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” brings basketball to a fictional world for immortals to face.
In a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball moves under the direction of choreographer Orlando Pabotoy. Actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked to set up the right screen, and Bowen eventually practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with tongue out. (Jordan is referred to in the play.)
As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, watched from tables filled with small inflatable basketballs, they worked on repositioning the lines as the choreography required. Although this version of Ellams’ poem has a cast of seven, he says it can be performed with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production in the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in England there are only two actors.)
Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since she was a teenager, said she created the character Demi to “do all the things I couldn’t do” on the court. He thought basketball had a bigger draw on stage because it was “a better sport.”
“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounced; it returns to your palm. You can destroy that. It is solitude, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There is excitement.”
“There’s a natural sadness about it,” he adds, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”
Of course there are other games that involve basketball. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who don’t have sex with their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” 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 NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” to play in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan. — no The Jordan — as he found himself playing in an international league with teammates six inches taller.
“I think basketball is the most important of all sports to up-and-coming directors and playwrights, even the ones I’ve talked to,” Morey said.
Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long fascinated playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 game“Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicts the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in men’s major league baseball when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues .
Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and in 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the popular 1976 underdog boxing film, on Broadway.
But right now, basketball is having a theater renaissance. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who have taken on the sport currently have a hot hand.
