That Championship Season

That Championship Season (1972), a play by Jason Miller. [Public Theatre, 844 perf.; Pulitzer Prize, Tony, NYDCC Awards.] Four former high school basketball players have come to the home of their old coach ( Richard A. Dysart) for a reunion. Their championship season would seem to have been but the beginning of successful careers for them, but appearances are deceiving. George Sikowski ( Charles Durning) has become a corrupt but ineffective politician; Tom Daley ( Walter McGinn), a cynical alcoholic; Phil Romano ( Paul Sorvino), a ruthless, lecherous strip miner and womanizer; and James Daley ( Michael McGuire), a failed high school administrator with futile dreams of success in politics. The absence of the fifth player on the team also says something about their victory; he refuses to come because he believes they won the championship unfairly. All the same, the coach manages to summon up memories of their one day of triumph in order to continue on. The New York Shakespeare Festival production of this mordant, unflinching look at middle‐American life boasted a superb cast under the careful direction of A. J. Antoon>. It was so successful Off Broadway that Joe Papp moved it to Broadway, where it won all the major awards. A 1999 revival by the Second Stage proved the work to be still very stageworthy. Jason MILLER (1940–2001) was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and was a film and stage actor as well as a playwright. His only other play to receive a major production was the short‐lived Nobody Hears a Broken Drum (1970).