Through July 28 at The Mahaiwe
Football has not always been big business. Eric Simonson's new play Lombardi, which is having its pre Broadway run at the Mahaiwe in Great Barrington, is set in 1965, when the most famous football coach in the land lived in an ordinary ranch house (which we see in a black and white photograph projected on the stage) and his wife hosted post-game parties with homemade crab dip in their basement rec room. It's the exact same era as Mad Men—the celebrated TV show about the pre-feminist New York advertising world—and Judith Light as Marie Lombardi is the archetypal executive wife who finds solace in good clothes, cocktails and flirting with younger men (such as her husband's players.) Light is so captivating—I kept thinking the subtitle of this play could be Long Day's Journey into Green Bay—that you're disappointed every time she exits the stage with her charm bracelet jingling. But Dan Lauria as Vince Lombardi is equally magnetic and he makes clear in a nuanced performance how a man so pig-headed in his obsession to win could be so loved by his players and indeed by the entire country. Lombardi is the best type of nostalgia, because it captures, as the coach says himself, a time when "we played for pride." It's the time before Nike endorsement deals and before "gottcha" You Tube videos when magazine articles had the power to wound great men, which is why Lombardi is so wary of the Look magazine reporter played by Keith Nobbs who comes to spend a week shadowing him, trying to figure out the Lombardi mystique. Using a reporter to tell the story is effective, because it shows how both journalism and football have been corrupted and infected by show business values over the past decades. The eternal joy and beauty of football is the magic of eleven guys working as one with a common purpose, and it's the same whether you're on the high school junior varsity or in the Super Bowl. There's nothing sweeter than a victory shared. And it's the same thing with a well-cast, well-written and well-directed play, which Lombardi most definitely is. When it arrives on Broadway in the fall, it's destined for a championship season. Lombardi at the Mahaiwe Great Barrington, MA
