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Review: In ‘The Last Match,’ Tennis Is Not Only a Game
THE LAST MATCH
By BEN BRANTLEY
OCT. 24, 2017
THE LAST MATCH
- Off Broadway, Drama, Play
- Closing Date: December 24, 2017
- Laura Pels Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, 111 W. 46th St.
- 212-719-1300
By BEN BRANTLEY
OCT. 24, 2017
- The “whiz” — or is it the “whoosh,” or maybe “sh-sh-sh-sh-sh”? — of an ace being served is described (competitively, of course) by rival tennis players in the opening moments of Anna Ziegler’s “The Last Match.” The speakers concede, though, that an onomatopoeia doesn’t do the job of explaining what it’s like to have a meteoric ball hurtling past your ears, shattering your hopes if not the sound barrier.
And besides, there’s another, graver noise that fills the heads of Tim (Wilson Bethel) and Sergei (Alex Mickiewicz) as they face off in the semifinals at the U.S. Open. That’s the roar of what Tim describes, in an agonized rush, as “the pressure and the failure and the death and the ambition and the coming up short.”
In other words, don’t you dare say it’s only a game. It’s not just a shiny cup that’s at stake in the ominously titled “The Last Match,” which opened Tuesday night at the Laura Pels Theater. It’s life itself.
In theory, such mortal stakes should make the simulated sporting event at the center of this Roundabout Theater Company production even more of a nail-biter than the real thing. Yet as directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, Ms. Ziegler’s 95-minute, four-character play succumbs early to the hypnotic, adrenaline-draining rhythms of a gentle, endless practice rally.
Exciting though they may be to watch in the stadium or on the screen, sports seldom make for gripping theater. The rare successful athletics-themed plays — from David Storey’s “The Changing Room” (1971) to Sarah DeLappe’s current “The Wolves” (which has been remounted by Lincoln Center Theater) — usually focus on what happens off the field (or the court), before and after the main event.
Ms. Ziegler, a fertile writer of admirably varied style and subject, considers the before-and-after part, too. But she has also dared to place “The Last Match” in the here and now of a game as it’s being played. We follow, more or less set by set, the match between Tim, a long-reigning American golden boy in his mid-30s, and the decade-younger Sergei, a rising star from Russia.
Not that the actors ever hit a genuine tennis ball, and they only rarely pick up rackets. Tim Mackabee’s open-sky blue-and-green set may evoke the daunting public stage of center court, but the real setting is the crowded interior of the players’ minds.
So as the aging Tim and the explosive Sergei struggle toward match point, their thoughts roam into the long, dark corridors of their pasts and presents. We learn of the agonizing attempts of Tim and his wife, Mallory (Zoë Winters), a retired player, to conceive a child; and of the combustible courtship of Galina (Natalia Payne), an occasional actress of immense vicarious ambition, by Sergei.
When the memories are especially hurtful, or the introspection too self-defeating, one of the players drops a set. Ms. Ziegler knows that self-consciousness is rarely an athlete’s friend, and there are moments when Tim or Sergei finds himself in the zone of a natural rhythm, when you almost palpably feel the satisfaction of instinctive performance.
More often, though, “The Last Match” evokes those literal-minded cinematic flashbacks, when a certain word makes a character’s eyes — and the camera’s focus — go hazy, and the story shifts woozily into a significant chapter in the past. The substance of such recollected moments here isn’t all that different from the thumbnail making-of-a-champion profiles that regularly punctuate Olympics broadcasts.
The performances rarely transcend the expected formula of such back stories. And the women’s roles are strictly supporting in all senses. But the well-cast Mr. Bethel endows Tim with a smooth Teflon surface just starting to show scratches, and Mr. Mickiewicz has an infectiously good time as the angry, bad-behaving underdog with a thick Slavic accent.
As always, Ms. Ziegler — whose work includes the biographical plays “Photograph 51,” about the scientist Rosalind Franklin (played in London by Nicole Kidman), and “Boy” — has not only done her research, but clearly thought hard about the implications of what she’s learned. There is the stuff of an elegant (if less than original) essay in “The Last Match” on how we invest in athletes as symbols and reflections of our own mortality.
Ms. Ziegler is also fast becoming a master of swelling choral dialogue, in which urgent but lyrical phrases are intoned in a counterpoint that seems to echo down the halls of history. (The splendid British playwright Michael Frayn, the author of “Copenhagen” and “Democracy,” is this style’s most accomplished practitioner.)
She delivers just such a sequence as “The Last Match” draws to its end. If you may have felt like changing to the Golf Channel before, you are sure to refocus your attention — and perhaps even go a little misty — as this production concludes.
The routine back-and-forth of a hard-fought match finally approaches the ineffable radiance of one of those moments that tennis fans live for. Time seems to stop in such moments, even as it extends into eternity.
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Category Off Broadway, Drama, Play
Credits Written by Anna Ziegler; Directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch
Cast Wilson Bethel, Alex Mickiewicz, Natalia Payne and Zoë Winters
Preview September 28, 2017
Opened October 24, 2017
Closing Date December 24, 2017
Upcoming Shows
Thursday October 26 7:30 pm
Friday October 27 7:30 pm
Saturday October 28 2:00 pm
Saturday October 28 7:30 pm
Sunday October 29 3:00 pm
This information was last updated: Oct. 26, 2017
A version of this review appears in print on October 26, 2017, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Oh, the Faults in Their Stars. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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