The Rare Intersection of Theater and Football

It’s Thanksgiving weekend.  That can only mean 2 things:  Turkey, Football, and people getting pepper sprayed at Walmart.

I guess that’s 3 things.

But this weekend and the traditions that come with it have led me to make the following conclusion:  I’d be a terrible NFL place kicker. Too many games have been won using the March-down-the-field-and-kick-a-field-goal-with-seconds-left-on-the-clock strategy.  You might see a total of 2 minutes playing time in any given game, and your job (and your career) rests on being consistent and scoring points every time you’re on the field, which is not the case for any other player.  And when it comes to legacy, there’s no middle ground.  Most place kickers are remembered for either their stunning successes or dream-crushing failures. It all rests on one moment in time.  A couple of seconds that can determine your fate and the fate of the people around you.

That moment can be an off-hand comment, like in Neil Labute’s reasons to be pretty, or it can be the work of a goddess, like in Ajax in Iraq by Ellen Mclaughlin.  I had the distinct pleasure of seeing both of these plays over the last couple months, and I can’t help feeling, in retrospect, that the universe is trying to tell me something.

reasons starts after Greg is overheard saying that his girlfriends face is “regular.”  The following 90 minutes shows the fallout of that one statement.  His 4-year relationship is over, his girlfriend moves out, he realizes his best friend is a douchebag, and everyone ends up making some pretty major life changes.  It feels like four people standing on a trampoline.  One person makes a slight shift, and everyone has to adjust.

Ajax comes out of his tent covered in blood, and says, “The mighty Ajax.  When I am remembered now, it will be for this.”  For those of you who haven’t kept up with your greek tragedy, Ajax was a war hero.  Then by some twist of fate, and some interference from the goddess of war, he’s driven mad and ends up going to town on some farm animals, thinking he’s torturing and killing the commanders who betrayed him.  In one fell swoop, everything he’d built up as far as greek warrior street cred is out the window.  And when the crazy subsides, he knows that all the good deeds he’d done and the glory he’d won for Greece will not shine brighter than this dark moment in his life.

This is hardly confined to place-kickers and theatrical characters, we see the OJ Simpsons, the Arnold Schwarzeneggers, and the Anthony Weiners fall off their pedestals, and for the most part, we find it intriguing; we might even enjoy the schadenfreude of it all.

Maybe some moments are more important than others, and maybe not.  There’s really no way of knowing which moments are the defining ones.  And perhaps that’s the deception; they’re all important.  They all have the potential to be defining moments, so we might as well make the most of them.  And it probably helps to do lots of squats and have really good aim.

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