Sports Plays is a volume about sports in the theatre and what it means to stage sports.
The chapters in this volume examine sports plays through a range of critical and theoretical approaches that highlight central concerns and questions both for sports and for theatre. The plays cut across boundaries and genres, from Broadway-style musicals to dramas to experimental and developmental work. The chapters examine and trouble the conventions of staging sports as they open possibilities for considering larger social and cultural issues and debates.
This broad range of perspectives make the volume a compelling resource for students and scholars of sport, theatre, and performance studies whose interests span feminism, sexuality, politics, and race.
Preface: A Bruce Lee Musical? (David Henry Hwang)
Bad at Sports: An Introduction (Broderick Chow & Eero Laine)
Sports/Race
Consequential Acts: Race, Sports, and Theatre (Harvey Young)
1. ‘Surviving Against the Sharp White [Tennis] Background’: Black Women’s Presence and Absence in Terrence McNally’s Deuce and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (Leticia L. Ridley)
2. Dribbling Against the Law: The Performance of Basketball, Race, and Resistance (Danielle A.D. Howard)
3. Football Plays and Racial Capitalism (Stefanie A. Jones)
Sex Segregation
Sex, Gender, and Playing Sport Structures (Jennifer Doyle)
4. Sport, Space, and Gender: Embodying Alternate Girlhoods in with The Wolves (Kim Solga)
5. Feminism on the Field: Tina Satter’s Sports Plays (Jessica Del Vecchio)
6. The Believability of Basketball: The Multiple Bodies of the Female Performer in The Tall Girls (Kelsey Blair)
Staged Combat
Stage Combats: Expectations, Illusions, and Quiescent Danger (Danielle Rosvally)
7. Staging the Boxing Ring as Heterotopia in Marco Ramirez’s The Royale (P. Solomon Lennox)
8. Bruce Lee’s Dancing Fight: David Henry Hwang’s Kung Fu on Stage (Zachary Price)
9. Between Power Bombs and Death Drops: Interpellation and Identity in The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and Queer Indie Wrestling (Kalle Westerling)
Sports Equipment
Sportswear Performs (Rachel Hann)
10. The Theatricality of the Locker Room, or Staging the Naked Jock (Sean Metzger)
11. ‘Cheering Ain’t for Show, Y’all’: Cheerleaders, Performative Uniforms, and Theatre Affect (Michelle Liu Carriger)
Afterword: Theatre, Sports, and Value (Broderick Chow & Eero Laine)
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Eero Laine is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.
Broderick Chow is Reader in Theatre, Performance and Sport and Deputy Dean (Interim) of the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London.
