- Katherine Brook
- Laryssa Husiak, being awesome.
“Are you an angry woman?” an interviewer (Joshua William Gelb) asks tennis champ Billie Jean King (Laryssa Husiak) within the first few minutes of Boom Arts’ new play, She is King. Like almost all of the text in She is King, it’s a question pulled verbatim from a real-life interview with King, in this case conducted by champion interrupter James Day.
Simply constructed from three such interviews (the others with Toni Tenille and a cringe-inducing Barbara Walters), She is King is a delightfully streamlined, deceptively simple look into the career of Billie Jean King—her significance to women’s sports, the sexism and homophobia she faced on the court and in the media just as Title IX was being implemented, and her own idiosyncrasies and candor—with none of the window dressing bloat of a biopic, or a more traditional play.
As King, the play’s creator, Laryssa Husiak, mirrors her subject’s words near-perfectly, and brings a warm, open energy to the role. The other actors—Gelb as James Day and King’s ex-husband, Larry (yes, that one); and Louisa Bradshaw as her female TV interviewers—are uniformly stellar, and the cast is joined by five local girls between the ages of 10 and 16, who do tennis drills with Husiak’s King, and provide the play’s tech support, camerawork (all of the interviews are projected onto a row of TV screens), scenery changes, and—in one instance—a hilariously lip-synched vitamin commercial.
I had high expectations for She is King—documentary theater’s always an interesting proposition, and Title IX, despite being a landmark piece of sports history for female athletes, rarely crops up in the slew of biopics about American athletics. I thought it would be good; I wasn’t expecting it to be so funny. The interviews are full of awkward clunkers and overt sexism that with time have become darkly funny. Watching Barbara Walters ask King if her lesbian affair would ruin the sport of tennis left me wondering why Walters still has a job. Geld’s turn as James Day was played for laughs, and won them. But it’s important to point out that the laughs this show got were all at the deserved expense of sexist jerks. It’s funny, yes, but there’s an unmistakable undertone of bleak catharsis; this isn’t broad comedy.
One of Boom Arts’ distinctions is its regular inclusion of post-show talk-backs. Unless truly exceptional, I’m no fan of these chats—too often they don’t add much to the experience as an audience member—but Boom Arts’ spin on the format is refreshingly well curated. Each performance will have a different lineup of guests on hand to discuss different aspects of Husiak’s piece—and to help frame within a local context King’s story (and a play that first opened in Iowa and comes to Portland via New York). On opening night, former PSU softball coach Teri Mariani and Olympic bronze medalist Joni Huntley discussed their experiences as athletes and coaches before and during the implementation of Title IX, as well as one of the biggest hurdles for women’s sports—media coverage. This weekend’s performances will feature reps from Nike, Bitch Media, Sports Illustrated, PSU, and more.
If you’ve ever subscribed to a Title IX catalog, or found yourself welling up over that one Nike commercial from 1995 (below, and also: no shame), you should probably get out to see She is King before its short run ends this weekend. And if you have girl-children, you owe it to them to take them with you when you do.
^^^STRAIGHT BAWLIN’.
She is King runs through June 7 at CoHo Theatre, 2257 NW Raleigh, performances Thurs-Sat 7:30 pm; Sun 2 & 7:30 pm, boomarts.org.