Playing Through

Shannon McCormick

I hesitate to say that Shannon McCormick and Graham Reynolds' Unbeaten, which finishes a two-week run at the Salvage Vanguard Theater this weekend, revels in the campiness of professional football. It might suggest that their play tries to make mockery of the game.

As it happens, McCormick and Reynolds are devoted fans of the game. They know the history and lore of football and understand its mythopoetic tropes. But, football is nevertheless a camp experience of a high order.

In her famous "Notes on 'Camp,'" Susan Sontag didn't cite pro football as an example. She was writing in 1964, before the Super Bowl, before the advent of end-zone theatrics, Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, and golf carts that look like giant helmets. I don't doubt that the game would make Sontag's list today. For, like drag queens and opera, pro football involves a "love of the exaggerated" – of the theatrical, the passionate, the ambitious, the glamorous. To enjoy football is to indulge in a "private zany experience," without judgment or intellectual pretension.

It was in that tender, loving spirit that McCormick and Reynolds developed Unbeaten, which focuses on a hypothetical NFL team – the Omaha Oxen – playing in what they call the Ultra Bowl. The one-man, partially improvised production features set-pieces from nine characters, ranging from the gentle-giant defensive lineman (who believes in tackling opponents in a Christian way) to the anxious and overhydrated place kicker (who needs to take a wicked whiz) – all of them played by McCormick with gusto and humor. His Coleco Baggins may be an egotistical, attention-seeking ass in the mold of Terrell Owens, but he's also a whole lot of fun. Likewise, his coach, Carl Hannegan, may be a foul-mouthed tyrant, but behind the harangues we see a frightened man driven by existential dread.

"We both really like sports," says Reynolds, who composed the music. "I suppose football is unlikely territory for a theatrical production. But it's almost like theatre in itself. Both are all about tension and release. Without that tension, it's boring. There's no reason to keep listening. Or watching."

In a way, McCormick adds, football fans are natural aesthetes, forever analyzing what makes for a genuine artistic experience. "More than any other sport, football has this over-the-top theatricality that everyone can engage in. We wanted to celebrate that. Simply satirizing something I don't care about – I'm not interested in that, in putting on plays where people pat themselves on the back, telling themselves they have all the right sentiment."

There are a lot of funny lines in Unbeaten, but my favorite is delivered by Harrison Round-tree – the team's openly gay wide receiver. "You know why coaches use Xs and Os to diagram plays?" he asks. "'Cause Xs and Os mean hugs and kisses."

The line may offend the hypermasculine anxieties of die-hard fans. It shouldn't. There's nothing wrong with admitting that for all its histrionic violence, football is, as Sontag might have said and as Unbeaten makes clear, "nourished by love."

For more on Unbeaten, read the review.