Well shy of 6 feet tall and without the hulking shoulders or bulging biceps you might expect in the midst of March Madness, James Aaron Oh flies across the theater stage, mimicking a basketball star as he dribbles and shoots with the grace of, well, an actor.
When Oh, who plays Manford in Walnut Creek’s Center Rep production of Lauren Yee’s “The Great Leap,” declares that he can hit 100 consecutive free throws without missing, his coach, played by Cassidy Brown, doesn’t believe him — and neither does the audience.
Is Manford actually going to hit 100 shots in a row, live on a stage shaped like a high school gym?
Manford faces the hoop, lifts the basketball in the air and — just before he lets go — the stage goes dark.
The audience laughs.
“At the end of the day, you might forgive somebody in any sports play, forgive that they’re not (Warriors star) Steph Curry, if they’re effective storytellers and are able to move you,” director Nicholas C. Avila says. “That’s my goal.”
By the time the production comes to an end, the number of shots attempted in a play centered around a basketball game is easy to tally. The answer, of course, is zero.
“‘The Great Leap’ is not about basketball at all,” says Markus Potter, artistic director of the Lesher Center-based repertory company. “It’s about personal identity, cultural heritage and the complexity of international relations.”
Three Bay Area productions are currently using sports as a backdrop for storytelling, with real-life March Madness luring audiences that skew younger and more diverse than the typical theater crowd. You’ll find basketball on stage not only in Walnut Creek, where “The Great Leap” runs through April 7, but in San Jose at City Lights Theater, where Fernanda Coppel’s “King Liz” plays through April 21. Tennis takes the spotlight in San Francisco, where Opera Parallele is staging a double bill of short works, “Birds & Balls,” at SFJAZZ Center through April 7.
“We have now combined these art forms,” says Nicole Paiement, the opera company’s conductor and artistic director. “If we do these kinds of projects that really merge the two, it opens the door to say, ‘hey, let’s have all these people enjoying and reflecting in a fun way on who we are.’”
Paiement hopes that the spirit of competition in “Birds & Balls” reveals something about human behavior. The setting for one of the two operas — using real grass — is the famous 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs that helped reshape the argument for women’s rights.
Mezzo-Soprano Nikola Printz performs during a rehearsal for Birds & Balls presented by Opera Paralléle and SF Jazz at 42nd Street Moon in San Francisco, Calif., on Thursday, March 21, 2024. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
The opera, by composer Laura Karpman and librettist Gail Collins, will be scored with “physicality and power,” Paiement said. The actors won’t actually smack tennis balls, but the audience will be immersed in the high-stakes game amid video footage of the tennis match and TV commercials that aired in ‘73.
“With music and sports, you need to be an athlete,” Paiement said. “I think of singers as major athletes, Olympic athletes on stage. In both worlds, you learn to be fearless, resilient and push yourself to deal with pressure.”
“The Great Leap” uses sports to tell the story of a Chinese American basketball player who travels to Beijing in the middle of a 1970s revolution for a “friendship game” that soon takes on greater meaning about stardom, culture and diplomacy. Avila, a former athlete, says he was thrilled to take on a sports-themed play.
“I feel like they don’t intersect enough, and there are a few reasons for that,” he says. “Most theater people are not sports people. And I think sports are incredibly difficult to tell stories with — to capture the authenticity of it. How do you create the action of a game on stage? In film, you can use lots of tricks to make people look more athletic than they are. But you can’t recreate Steph Curry.”
Avila said the trick is not to re-create the sporting scenes, but to “capture the investment of the outcome.”
For City Lights’ production “King Liz,” which tells a basketball story from the perspective of a female sports agent, the play’s director Kinan Valdez turned the stage into a basketball court with actors running around “to capture the spirit of a modern sports event, which leans towards spectacle these days.”
“All mass media and mass entertainment forms seem to be intersecting along those lines,” he says.
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But why the sudden influx of sports-themed theater productions in the Bay Area?
“Just a decade ago, athletes were trained to shut up and do their job and not speak up about our cultural climate or global politics,” said Potter, the Center Rep artistic director and an assistant professor in the University of Kansas’ theater department. “I always appreciate an athlete who is willing to put themselves on the line to talk about broader societal issues, because it opens up ideas and makes people hear these ideas in a way they can sometimes tune out.
“That’s what I hope theater is doing at its core: deep empathy building. That’s what we’re doing when we go to the theater. We’re there to learn about ourselves.”
And directors don’t need their actors to hit 100 free throws to be successful.
“In the profession, there are constant discussions of, ‘how do we cultivate the next generation of theater audience?’” Avila said. “And, ‘how do we get younger, more diverse people into the room?’ This is a good way.”