CHICAGO — Ask most directors if their world-premiere Chicago show might have a chance at Broadway and they’ll demur. “Just doing it for here,” they’ll say, or some version of how such bridges should not yet be crossed.
Kenny Leon is not most directors. Especially when the show in question, Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” at the Steppenwolf Theatre, revolves around a certain basketball player named LeBron James.
“One thousand percent, I think this show is going to Broadway,” Leon said in a recent interview in Steppenwolf’s Front Bar, grinning all the way. “If this show does not go to Broadway, I will be totally shocked. I am betting on myself and the logic of having the right people in the right room.”
At age 66, Leon is at the peak of his influence in American theater.
He first emerged around 1990 as artistic director of the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, one of the early wave of Black leaders in nonprofit American theater. He left that position in 2000, founding his own theater company known as the True Colors Theatre Company, also an Atlanta-based operation, albeit with an additional foothold in Washington, D.C.
But in recent years, Leon has become synonymous with Broadway. He directed the Broadway premiere of August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” (a new production, directed by Chuck Smith, just closed at the Goodman Theatre), the 2004 revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (with Sean Combs) and the 2010 Broadway revival of “Fences” starring Denzel Washington. In 2016, he collaborated again with Washington on another revival of “A Raisin in the Sun,” famously attended by President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama.
During the pandemic, Leon helped found a group called Black Theater United, brokering a notably practical and reasonable deal between this group of mostly highly successful Black Broadway artists and industry leaders that has resulted in agreements that already have led (among other things) to greater technical and artistic opportunities for young Black professionals and the renaming of Broadway theaters for iconic Black actors. “We all are trying,” Leon says, “to build a way for those who come after us.”
As Leon tells it, Chicago has long been part of his destiny. “I’ve been dancing around this place for so many years. This really is the only place I think of as home that’s not really home,” says the Atlanta-based director. Leon went on to describe his friendship with the late Martha Lavey of Steppenwolf, his Chicago experiences alongside Wilson and his play “Radio Golf,” and how Leon almost was hired as Dean of DePaul University’s Theatre School, long ago. And he’s aware of the city’s many artistic vacancies, including the job at the Goodman Theatre. “A place like that,” he said, “is certainly somewhere that anybody would have to consider.”
But “King James” is to be Leon’s Steppenwolf debut. The new Steppenwolf artistic director, Glenn Davis, is in the cast, along with Chris Perfetti. Davis said he just called up Leon, a busy guy, and persuaded him to fit the piece into his schedule, dangling Steppenwolf as an incentive by telling him he was “right for the project.”
“I’m a big fan of Rajiv,” Leon said, describing why he agreed to mess with his own schedule. “In a way, he reminds me of August.”
The play, which was postponed due to the pandemic and was initially slated to be directed by the former Steppenwolf artistic director Anna D. Shapiro, is indeed about LeBron James, although not in the biographical sense. Nobody plays the basketball great.
Rather, the piece looks at “King” James through his influence on the city of Cleveland. The arc of the play, which covers some 12 years from LeBron’s rookie season to the winning of an NBA championship, focuses on two friends who bond through their shared fandom of struggling Cleveland’s most famous figure.
Leon gets that. He has been a Los Angeles Lakers fan for 35 years despite growing up in Florida. “We didn’t have a basketball team in Florida,” he says, “so you were either Boston or L.A.”
The theater, of course, has often tried to cash in on the popularity of sports. But it often has struggled, due in large part to the difficulty of replicating the games themselves on a stage with actors rather than players. And thus although “King James” is billed as a work designed to explore how sports infuses our lives and relationships, the story is something of an offbeat way of getting at the phenomenon of LeBron.
Leon noted that the man himself is very much aware of the project, which was co-commissioned by Steppenwolf and the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles. He is likely to show up and see it at some point; Steppenwolf, of course, would be delighted if that were opening night in Chicago. But there will be a subsequent Los Angeles run of the production.
Leon has many subsequent projects on the docket, including a Broadway production of Adrienne Kennedy’s “The Ohio State Murders” (a superb play that never has been on Broadway) likely starring Audra McDonald, a planned new take on Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Topdog/Underdog,” and a project involving the oeuvre of the famed Black writer, actor and director Melvin Van Peebles, a man widely regarded as the godfather of Black American cinema who died in September at 91.
Leon is now something of an elder statesman of the theater himself, even though his appearance belies his years.
“I do think my best work is still ahead,” he said. “It is crucial that the younger generation of artists, especially Black artists, works with those who have the experience with the craft. That way we can create beautiful stuff together, and we make America better.”
Sounds like something LeBron James might say.
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'KING JAMES'
At Steppenwolf in Chicago: In previews now. Opens Sunday. Ends April 10.
At the Mark Taper Forum in L.A.: Previews begin June 1. Opening night is June 8. Scheduled to end July 3.
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