Theatre Development Fund – TDF: It's fitting that a coed creative team decided to theatricalize the 1973 "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match between 29-year-old women's champion Billie Jean King and misogynistic 55-year-old huckster Bobby Riggs. Cowritten and codirected by two male-female pairings, Balls is a circus sideshow take on an iconic event that sparked gender debates that are still going today.
4 comments:
This is a really interesting take on a true battle of the sexes. I remember when I was little my mom always talking to me about the match between King-Riggs and how for her it was a sense of empowerment and inspirational event for her. Tennis is one of those sports that has that weird institutional and unnecessary divides between the sexes and it just doesn't seem rights. But at the same time I think its interesting how for this piece One year lease decided to go with two teams of men and women in the creative process in order to retain the perspective and the integrity of the story. The idea that this story can be shown on stage is something that I simply never deemed to be a possibility and find really interesting to see in a developmental stage. I wonder were stories like this will keep appearing in stage and screen to make sure that we are able to acknowledge our past wrong doings as today we try to move forward together as men and women in this fight for equality,
Since the Battle of the Sexes was known as one of the most important tennis matches of all time, I think it’s really interesting that they aren’t taking the event too seriously. I would be intrigued to figure out how the production pulls off playing tennis onstage. Sometimes sports don’t work onstage, because of the suspension of disbelief. In that way, I think it would be extremely tricky to center a play around a tennis match and retain the intrigue and drama throughout. I also think that it’s an important story to tell because of the cultural impacts that the event had and the way it changed women’s sports. As the article mentioned one of the reasons that we are still talking about the King-Riggs match, is it still contains issues that we are dealing with today. I think using history is a great way to talk about gender inequality.
I too played tennis in high school, though only for one season on the junior varsity team. (I eventually got my varsity letter for theater.) The current times seem like this show is a great opportunity for commentary on the times and to bring about change. One of the things that I've heard my whole life - especially my adult life - is that girls can do anything that boys can do. And this is no exception. Tennis, while it does include a lot of physical strength, is also about strategy and physics. Producing a play about tennis is a new one to me, but I guess there are other plays about sport though they may not play the sport on stage. There are certain requirements to do it, but not as many as one might thing. I'd be most concerned about a stray ball hitting an audience member or a piece of equipment.
I’ve been wanting to see Battle of the Sexes for a while now after I first watched the documentary on the infamous tennis match several years ago. I never thought of the storyline to be very conducive to a theatrical production, but after reading about it the show sounds like a really interesting take on history put onto the stage. I appreciated that the production didn’t come at representing the famous story from a 1973 perspective, but one looking back on what happened through 2018’s lens. I think this approach to making theatre is so critical for artists nowadays, as sometimes it’s easy to get so stuck in the details of making a historical production accurate in every possible way while ignoring the larger implications of the show. This production of “Balls” seemed to follow this and look at it through a more contemporary lens, begging the audience to ask themselves how far we’ve come concerning gender issues-- or possibly, how we haven't come very far at all.
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