In their introduction to Sports Plays, editors Eero Laine and Broderick Chow note that while the conventions shared by theatre and sports are obvious to casual observers, scholarship on their intersections is ‘far from a cohesive field, sub-field, or even sub-sub-field’ (p. 5). That may change with this volume, which, like Shannon L. Walsh's anthology Sporting Performances: Politics in Play (2020), showcases an impressive breadth of emerging perspectives on sports among performance scholars. What makes Sports Plays unique is that instead of sports as performance, contributors investigate the dynamics of representing sports onstage. Of particular interest to the editors is a ‘shift in spectatorship prompted by the encounter of sports and theatre’ (p. 7); as the best contributions illustrate, such a shift casts both forms in a revealing light.
Of the book's four sections, the first two – ‘Sports/Race’, introduced by Harvey Young, and ‘Sex Segregation’, introduced by Jennifer Doyle – most effectively demonstrate the diversity of approaches to this central conceit. ‘Sports/Race’ opens with a finely executed comparative analysis by Leticia L. Ridley, who examines Terrence McNally's Deuce alongside the dramatization of Claudia Rankine's Citizen, illustrating how the latter illuminates the way black women's bodies are policed in the predominately white space of elite tennis. Danielle A. D. Howard and Stefanie A. Jones adopt similar approaches to basketball and American football plays respectively: Howard successfully supports her theory of the basketball ‘crossover’ as resistance to racial scripting in her analysis of Seth Panitch's oral-history-based play Separate and Equal, while Jones elucidates football's embeddedness within racial capitalism as seen in several dramas – and as roleplayed in fantasy football. ‘Sex Segregation’ features entries that, taken together, best illustrate how embodying sports onstage can unpack the corporeal politics they enact. Kim Solga, drawing on the bodily discomfort of her own adolescence, pulls Sarah DeLappe's play The Wolves into conversation with Caryl Churchill's Top Girls to levy a critique on ‘post-feminist’ girlhood, while Jessica Del Vecchio analyses, with evident admiration, how playwright Tina Satter's queer, hyper-feminized sports plays reconfigure football's macho heteronormativity. Kelsey Blair, a basketball player-turned-coach writing on Meg Miroshnik's The Tall Girls, presents the anthology's most rigorous account of the practical challenges faced by actors who portray athletes, noting how such roles draw performers into unique relationships with the histories of sex discrimination.
Despite their themes, many of the essays in the remaining sections hew more closely to the mechanics of dramatization than they do to the complexities of embodiment. ‘Staged Combat’, introduced by fight choreographer Danielle Rosvally, features entries by P. Solomon Lennox, who theorizes the boxing ring as a heterotopia through Marco Ramirez's play The Royale, and Zachary Price, who examines Bruce Lee's ‘racial kinesthesia’ as narrativized in David Henry Hwang's musical Kung Fu. Kalle Westerling, meanwhile, thoughtfully reads Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity through the lens of disidentification to set up a survey of queer wrestling's own deliberate disidentifications. Rounding out the sections is ‘Sports Equipment’, introduced by Rachel Hann, which features Sean Metzger's ruminations on how staging the locker room (bare bodies and all) allows audiences to dwell on ‘constructed spaces of transformation’ (p. 175) and Michelle Liu Carriger's witty dissection of the dense symbolism embodied by American cheerleaders.
Like any compelling anthology, Sports Plays succeeds thanks to the strength of its framework and the variety of perspectives it contains. That variety is a credit to Laine and Chow, who recruited contributors from diverse backgrounds and with differing, sometimes divergent, affinities for sport. As a result, the entries are sometimes redundant in their explanations of sports’ theatricality and strained by ill-fitting or overly expansive comparisons (it should also be noted that the copy-editing leaves something to be desired). However, overlaps and overextensions are often the pitfalls of charting new terrain. Ultimately, while the most provocative entries engage the complex interplay of similarity and difference inherent in staging sports, all of them earn merit for validating sports plays, and sports themselves, as rich, multivalent sites of inquiry. Scholars and educators will do well to take up the book's invitation to examine the work of performance, in all its iterations, as revealed through the pseudo-meta-theatricality of the sports play. Any such endeavour should count this text as foundational, whatever field, sub-field, or sub-sub-field becomes of it.
