CHICAGO — Sustained close friendships take work, especially for men. They’re invariably fragile relationships, easily destroyed by inattention, jealousy, inequalities of wealth and success (or one party’s perceptions thereof), or mutual lack of care. And that’s just the internal stuff: many close pals have been driven apart by external affairs like politics or race or merely that which comes down at the office.
Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” tells a very moving, accessible and openhearted story of two friends in Cleveland who bond and come unstuck over the rise (and subsequent exit and return) of LeBron Raymone James Sr., the pride of northeast Ohio and the Cleveland Cavaliers and for years a symbol of what Cleveland could and could not achieve. The play, which stars the warm and vulnerable duo of Glenn Davis and Chris Perfetti (”Abbott Elementary”), likely will be a big hit for Steppenwolf and rightly so. It is a simple piece of highly commercial theater, short, not overly taxing of its exhausted audience, and surely autobiographical. It’s also full of heart, un-preachy and filled with humor and a healing racial energy. Ergo, it’s very well-timed.
At first glance, the play, which is directed by Kenny Leon with a palpable sense of enjoyment and enhanced by the simple but shrewdly epic settings of Todd Rosenthal, is about guys and sports, an exploration of how the doings of a favorite NBA team (although it could be any team) gives emotionally stunted, or communicatively challenged, men something to bond over, belong to, talk about, feel together.
I’ve seen that in the theater several times before, although most plays about pro sports have been terrible. Joseph is too fine a writer to fit into that category.
What makes this two-hander unusual, to my mind, is how well it explores that idea of how friendships need tending like gardens. Joseph is still a young man and his play doesn’t explore what happens as his two Clevelanders (one white, one Black) move into old age; his piece begins when they are in their 20s and follows them for a decade or so, during which time James makes a splash in Cleveland, exits for the Miami Heat and then returns to the Cavs, bringing them a world championship in 2016 and the city’s first professional championship (in any sport) in more than half a century.
One of the friends, Shawn, follows what you might call the LeBron track to success, thus bringing up, on a micro friendship level, all that Cleveland debated about James: Was he wrong to leave for Miami? Did he really care about the city? Did he prize individual success over what was good for a struggling Midwest city that invariably lost talent? Did the city let him down?
How you feel about that, of course, typically depends on your age. When young, you tend to argue that success requires selfishness. When you’re older, you come to see that people and relationships are what matter and that those you loved (and possibly lost) early in your life matter more than you realize. You don’t seek out the future so much as learn to pay homage to your past. You finally see that the season ticket with your friend where you spend the whole game complaining to each other wasn’t really about the game at all, but you and your friend.
That said, I know former fans of teams who’ve dropped them like a hot potato after a perceived slight, acting like a jilted lover, traveling miles to get their fix elsewhere. It can be that personal.
As I sat there on Sunday, my mind went to how the owners of said teams so rarely realize what they are actually selling and how easily they torpedo relationships between fans and players. Just ask a Cubs fan.
Cities like Cleveland and its peers typically are viewed as consumers by big coastal media, not producers. Major league sports are the one exception but the big coastal media markets still operate like magnets, drawing the biggest talent, breaking up emblematic friendships at the end of every season. That’s also what this little play is about. It catches this city’s perennial grudge.
Had Joseph called his show “two friends in Cleveland, sitting around talking about basketball and themselves” instead of “King James,” of course, you’d not be reading all the ink right now in New York and Los Angeles, nor would you have seen audience members in LeBron shirts or felt a certain celeb buzz in the Steppenwolf house as people looked around for atypically tall audience members. There is, I suppose, a bit of a bait-and-switch. Frankly, this could be assuaged in future drafts by amping up the LeBron and other NBA content (Jordan comparisons!); the Steppenwolf audience clearly was hungry for more. And the theater’s gotta do what it’s gotta do, especially when it has writing of this level of honesty to deliver.
You could also see this show as a future movie, a history of a sports star and his struggling city, as told by a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, a Statler and a Waldorf, two kvetching ordinary dudes with season tickets, wanting to believe they are mutually loved.
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'KING JAMES'
When: Through April 10
Where: Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted St.
Running time: 2 hours
Tickets: $20-$88 at 312-335-1650 or steppenwolf.org
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