July 22 - 28
Actor Dan Lauria will portray the Green Bay Packers coach on stage.Millerton resident and New York Times best-selling author Peter Richmond, whose new book, Badasses:The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders (Harper Collins) will be published this fall, interviewed playwright Eric Simonson for RI on the eve of Lombardi's out-of-town tryout in Great Barrington. It begins previews at Circle-in-the-Square on September 23, with the Broadway opening set for October 21.
Lear, Loman . . . Lombardi? A legendary football coach as stage protagonist? Though the sporting world is no stranger to the Broadway stage—Damn Yankees used the backdrop of baseball to tell its Faustian tale, and Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize winning That Championship Season revolved around the reunion of a college basketball team—no one’s dared broach the gridiron. Eric Simonson, however, has always been drawn to unlikely subjects, whether he’s dramatizing the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, putting Ahab onstage or directing an Academy-Award-winning documentary about Norman Corwin, an obscure visionary of radio’s golden age. And for a Wisconsin farm kid who grew up watching Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers playing in the football temple of Lambeau Field, writing a play about the sport’s most storied coach was probably inevitable: the driven Lombardi’s successes vaulted him beyond the grid of sport, and into the pantheon of American icons—a territory Simonson loves to tread. “The most interesting thing to me,” he says by phone from Los Angeles, “is why they are all lone individuals. They’re saying something in such an original way that it makes them pioneers.”
In a way, Simonson belongs in that club. Writing a play about a man who lived, breathed and worshipped the game of football—without being able to show the beautiful brutality of the game itself—would figure to be, at the least, problematic. (Of course, Shakespeare couldn’t portray the battles in Macbeth, and the box-office returns have worked out pretty well for that one.) But capturing the soul of a football coach without showing any football? “You have to accept that you’re not going to do what a film would do: cut to the game, do a montage of how the game went,” says Simonson. “Instead, you focus on the characters and economize as much as possible, creating interesting characters who have obstacles in front of them when they’re trying to get something.” A member of Chicago’s Famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Simonson was nominated for a directing Tony in 1993 for The Song of Jacob Zulu, and in 2006, he won that Oscar for his 40-minute film A Note of Triumph, the story of radio essayist Norman Corwin. For Lombardi, he drew on material from David Maraniss’s bestselling biography, When Pride Still Mattered, to debut a very different play two years ago for the Madison (Wisconsin) Repertory Theater. “The play I had written before was more weighted on ideas than action, more thought-provoking than entertaining,” he says. “It was a whimsical look into Lombardi’s subconscious.”
But when producers in New York showed interest in staging a more biographical Lombardi play last year, Simonson started over again, saving just one five-minute scene from the original. Eschewing the cradle-to-grave “biodrama” form he and co-writer Jeffrey Hatcher had used in Work Song their play about Wright, Simonson decided to limit the dramatic action to a single week, during which a journalist lives with Lombardi (Dan Lauria) and his wife, Marie (Judith Light), in search of a feature story. The reporter ends up finding out more about Lombardi’s inner life—as well as his own—than he bargained for. “He discovers that Lombardi will never be completely happy because he will never see his work reach complete perfection. And Lombardi infuses that philosophy into the reporter, inspires him to achieve the same kind of perfection in his own work.” In Lombardi, the game is nothing more than the fabric into which Simonson has woven the character of an intense, complex, highly religious man whose searchings struck a universal chord for the author. “I see in the Jesuit philosophy a linking of perfection, a closeness to God, through work, that mirrors the philosophy of the culture of the country: the idea that if you work hard and pay your dues you will profit spiritually and economically," says Simonson. "And Lombardi personified it. That’s at the core of why he’s such a cultural icon: he was striving for perfection. I do that in my life, and I see a lot of people who do that same thing—going after an impossible goal." LombardiJuly 22 - 28 Mahaiwe Performing Arts CenterGreat Barrington, MA
