"Those Cold and Timid Souls Who Knew Neither Victory Nor Defeat": The Politics of Jason Miller's That Championship Season (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his six-page introduction to the first published edition of Jason Miller's Pulitzer prize-winning That Championship Season (1972), Joseph Papp uses a myriad of phrases to classify the play. At various points throughout the introduction, Papp dubs it "an unusual play" (viii); "an actor's play" (viii); "a winner" (xiii); "a play that is a modern work with its basic roots in America" (xiii); "a workingman's play" (xiii); "a play that is of interest and concern to all classes of people" (xiii); "a 'popular' work" (xiii); and "a play for the people of America" (xiii). As the producer, director and--perhaps most significantly--founder of New York City's Public Theatre, Papp was certainly someone who had an aptitude for recognizing important theatre when he saw it. Miller, for his part, was both an actor and a playwright, and, despite the fact that he was a much more accomplished writer of plays than an actor in films, his theatrical career would forever be overshadowed by a film role he would take on the following year in 1973 when he played Father Damien Karras, the conflicted Jesuit priest from Georgetown University, in The Exorcist. Given these circumstances, Papp and Miller, indeed, would become unlikely, yet very successful, collaborators on That Championship Season. The question then is: how does the dramatization of the reunion of a group of middle-aged men gathered at their former coach's house to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of their Pennsylvania State high school basketball championship justify the encomia Papp lavishes upon it? Or, perhaps more appropriately, does it at all justify that praise? Papp admits that when Miller first brought the play to him, his first reaction was that the play "needed a lot of work" (ix), specifically in that some of its characters were sometimes "overdrawn" (viii) while the dialogue contained a number of "overwritten speeches" (viii). The play also is rife with ethnically, racially, and sexually offensive commentaries from its characters, surely evoking not only typically male locker room banter but also the rhetoric of a group of socially privileged white males. Moreover, its characters come to no great revelations, make no decisive conclusions about their lives and, at play's end, are in much the same circumstances they found themselves at the opening of Act One. So how did such a play develop into an award-winning drama and come to be all the things that Papp in his introduction declared it to be? How could a man who is better known for intoning "The Power of Christ compels you" than he is for anything else in his professional career so capture the spirit of a nation and the ethos of a people in a play about sports and politics?