The first game of the first set of the so-called Battle of the Sexes — the $100,000 winner-take-all tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973 — is marvelously reproduced in a new play called “Balls.”
Unfortunately, there are 27 games to go.
One thing I have to say for “Balls,” which opened Wednesday at 59E59 Theater, is that it has ... a lot of nerve. Plays about sports are not often very good, plays about tennis even less so, and this particular contest — recently the subject of the film “Battle of the Sexes” — would seem to be overmined. Even if stage directors can invoke the audience’s imagination to fill in the blanks, filling in so many gets tiring fast.
This hasn’t deterred playwrights Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery — he the author of the well-received “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally” and she of the harrowing and decidedly non-Disney “Frozen.” They insist on depicting the entire three-set match, albeit in mime: straightforwardly on three occasions (as in that first game) but mostly in various theatrical transformations thereafter. Sometimes King (Ellen Tamaki) is upstage; sometimes Riggs (Donald Corren) is. Sometimes only one of them is seen, sometimes neither. The net may be parallel or perpendicular or diagonal to the audience, or it may move; occasionally there is no net at all. In one lovely black-light scene, only the ball is visible.
Although this action is cleverly devised by directors Ianthe Demos and Nick Flint, and executed perfectly under the movement direction of Natalie Lomonte, it is neither tennis nor theater but a kind of hysteria. The whole play seems to be constructed backward, starting with a concept requiring a full 85 minutes of athletic representation and ending with the maddening question of how to fill all that time. Narratives so constructed often leave you thinking, “Why?” but, in “Balls,” the authors’ solutions, trite and tiresome, have you frequently blurting, “What?”
Because, yes, there are clowns.
Two, actually: one male (Richard Saudek) and one female (Olivia McGiff). These characters, both wearing huge ties, clashing stripes and dopey moues, often double as line judges, but at other times may be found juggling, doing prop comedy or firing tennis ball bazookas labeled “gay rights” and “women’s rights” at King.
Also filling the time are several other male-female pairs, presumably emphasizing the battle of the sexes theme. When not dashing back and forth along the net, the ball boy and ball girl (Alex J. Gould and Elisha Mudly) portray a couple whose 40-year relationship, from first flirtation through postdivorce amity, unfolds in a different time scheme from the rest of the play. Another pair, Terry and Cherry (Danny Bernardy and Cristina Pitter), are garish, loudmouthed superfans, which is not even the right caricature. And Chris Evert and Jim Brown show up, too, because why not?
More relevantly, King’s husband, Larry (Danté Jeanfelix), and lover, Marilyn Barnett (Zakiya Iman Markland), are courtside, engaged in a passive-aggressive match of their own. In this sense alone, the play goes deeper than the recent movie, perhaps because the movie involved King as a “special consultant.” “Balls” doesn’t blink at the women’s affair and its ugly aftermath, even though Barnett’s groundbreaking “galimony” suit came eight years after the match. Explaining her motivation to the audience, Barnett trenchantly says, “I wanted equal pay.”
Not much else is trenchant or even sensible. When the authors get really desperate to run down the clock, they start peppering the play with tennis trivia and Wikipedia facts we are meant to find relevant by temporal proximity. (Monica Lewinsky was born the same year as the match!) Nor are the implications of the play’s title left unexplored. A puerile prologue imagines prehistoric man and woman discovering the parts of their bodies that resemble spheres and hemispheres. Man immediately exaggerates the size of his.
I’m not suggesting that King vs. Riggs was a match without larger meaning; it was legitimately fraught with epochal implications. Although Riggs clearly did it for the cash, King only agreed to participate in order to further the work of feminism and to promote the nascent professional women’s tennis tour she had recently helped establish. Her personal story, of embracing strength and being pushed out of the closet and suffering the repercussions, was also tremendously consequential.
But for all its layers, “Balls” never gets anywhere near an insightful gloss on the battle of the sexes, writ large or small. It’s not the actors’ fault: Tamaki, without aiming for an impersonation, gets the tunnel-vision quality of King’s personality just right. And Corren, rocking an awful wig, makes a delightful Riggs, imbuing that scamp and self-promoter with a suggestion of depth he probably doesn’t deserve.
Neither the performances nor the clever set by Kristen Robinson and spot-on costumes by Kenisha Kelly are enough, though: “Balls” is as intellectually underfed as it is imaginatively overindulgent. That, as Riggs learned in losing the last point of the match, is a fatal double fault.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.