A Comical Look at the Childish Side of Sports
Post on: 2011-11-02 By: admin
Theater Review | 'The Complete World of Sports (abridged)'
A Comical Analysis of Sports’ Childish Side
Austin Tichenor, left, Reed Martin, center, and Matt Rippy, the cast of "The Complete World of Sports (abridged)."
Published: October 30, 2011
What’s the worst way a day can end for a diligent Manhattan worker bee? You’ve logged some late hours at your desk, pushing through a project or getting ready for that big meeting in the morning. You hop the 11 p.m. train for your suburban castle, looking forward to winding down on the ride.
Complete Sports, Abridged
Complete Sports, Abridged
But as soon as the doors close, you realize you’re on a sports train, one crammed with fans on their way home from a Rangers or Mets or any other flavor of game. There will be no rest for the weary on this commute. Instead there will be overwhelming proof that sports bring out the adolescent in otherwise responsible adults: your fellow passengers will indulge in deafening chest-thumping (if it was a win), ear-splitting wailing and cursing (if it was a loss), possibly even fistfights (if it was a crosstown rivalry).
Reed Martin, Austin Tichenor and Matt Rippy have apparently been on a few such trains, taking notes. “The Complete World of Sports (abridged),” their daffy stage show at the New Victory Theater, is pitched directly, and proudly, at the juvenile in sports fans of all ages. As the program notes, it, like other productions by their Reduced Shakespeare Company, is rated PG-13: “pretty good if you’re 13.”
The show, a manically paced collection of one-liners and puns with a little audience participation thrown in, promises to take up “every single sport ever played on every continent,” as Martin says, and it more or less does. The three men, delivering the material in a parody of an ESPN “SportsCenter,” proceed to divide sports into nine categories (“Ball and Stick,” “Sports Played in a Circle,” “Fastest and Strongest”) and then visit each continent to review what is or used to be played there.
Some of the sports mentioned are obscure to the point of possibly being fictitious: extreme curling, cigar boxing. But the familiar ones are given ample time as well.
One funny bit reports on rules changes to soccer to make it more palatable to Americans, like having each goal be worth 20 points and adding firearms. (“He shoots, he scores takes on new meaning.”) Another delves into the Coaches’ Cliché Handbook. At Friday night’s performance, a sketch declaring baseball to be boring had even been amended to account for the not-at-all-boring World Series game the night before.
If baseball is boring, then golf, as portrayed here, is downright embarrassing. Act 2 opens with the three men in the most ludicrous collection of garments (lots of plaid) you’re likely to see short of a Halloween party, and an argument ensues over whether golf is actually a sport. “It must be a sport,” Tichenor says. “It’s on ESPN.” There follows an earnest, preposterous discussion of the difference between sports and games. You may never have debated whether Candy Land is a sport, but these guys do.
Yes, golf takes a beating, but no sport emerges from this concoction looking anything other than ridiculous. Yet somehow this frenetic show leaves you with a new appreciation for just how dull life would be had the idea of athletic competition never been invented.
“The Complete World of Sports (abridged)” continues through Sunday at the New Victory Theater, 209 West 42nd Street; (646) 223-3010, newvictory.org.
A version of this review appeared in print on October 31, 2011, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: A Comical Analysis Of Sports’ Childish Side.
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Article original from: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/sports/the-complete-world-of-sports-abridged-review.html
