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As someone whose life has largely been a series of happy accidents, I am a great believer in serendipity. Consequently, I wasn't surprised to discover that the preview performances of a revival of "That Championship Season" were beginning while I was in New York City for an American Theatre Critics Association meeting in February.
"Championship's" playwright, Jason Miller, was one of my best friends in graduate school. I saw the original production of the play with him in 1972, when it swept all the major theater awards and won the Pulitzer Prize.
What made this production even more intriguing was that Miller's son, Jason Patric, was in the cast. Not only was he acting in his father's play, but he was playing Tom, the character in many ways closest to the playwright's heart.
Tom, an alcoholic, is the play's truth teller, sardonically confronting his compatriots with uncomfortable realities they would rather forget. I seem to remember that Miller, also an actor, even played that role in a regional production.
The play depicts the reunion of four members of a high-school basketball team with their father-figure coach as they attempt to recapture the glory of winning the state championship two decades earlier. As the evening unfolds, the surface of their apparently complacent and successful lives peels away to reveal the hollowness, compromises, corruption and betrayal that lie hidden beneath.
Seeing "Championship" again on a stage, where it really belongs — the 1982 film and 1999 television versions were disappointing — was very rewarding, while watching Patric in it was almost surreal at times. His looks are an interesting fusion of his parents (his mother, Linda, was also an actor), and although he is a very different actor from his father, he shares his intensity, his eye for detail and even some of his mannerisms.
Miller grew up in Scranton, Penn., and the play's portrait of the prejudices sometimes held by residents of America's blue-color small towns remains telling and timely, perhaps even more so in today's economic climate.
The play's surprising, sometimes shocking, revelations push it toward melodrama, but the restraint and focus of Gregory Mosher's direction and the grounded ensemble performances deftly sidestep that pitfall in this production. Along with Patric, the cast consists of Jim Gaffigan, Chris Noth and Kiefer Sutherland as the players and Brian Cox as their coach.
One of "Championship's" principal themes is early promise denied, and ironically Miller shared that with his characters. His success came all at once and fled almost as quickly: The same year "Championship" was harvesting its awards, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in "The Exorcist."
In later life, he retreated to Scranton, where he tried to start a regional theater and died at 62 as much of drink and disappointment as heart failure. Patric hopes the current production will reaffirm his father's reputation and playwriting prowess.
That "Championship" made it back to Broadway at all is also a happy accident. Mosher, who was impressed by the play, went looking for the rights and had no idea that Patric was Miller's son.
Once the two of them got together, everything else fell into place. I was pleased to see the full house and enthusiastic response the play received the night I attended. Miller would be happy to know that "Championship" has something to say to a new generation.