‘Small Ball’ double dribbles
The reality: Rocket GM’s musical is quirky but not about basketball
Think of the Catastrophic Theatre as a Silicon Valley startup, the kind that invests in outlandish idea after outlandish idea until one of them strikes a nerve and suddenly doesn’t seem so weird anymore. Instead of the next Uber, the company’s on the lookout for the modern-day “Waiting for Godot,” populating its seasons with dark, bizarre new works from writers who aren’t interested in or haven’t yet found widespread recognition.
Experimentation, naturally, comes with a less than 100 percent success rate.
“Small Ball,” at the MATCH through May 13, is the Catastrophic’s latest concoction, a colliding of two worlds whose raison d'être falls in line with the theater’s commitment to the unexpected and bizarre. Because of Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey’s investment in the project, an unusual amount of clout and curiosity surround its arrival.
But after an opening night attended by NBA and NBA-adjacent Alisters sporting chic blazers and giant Twitter followings, the jury’s still out on whether the story “Small Ball” tells is more interesting than the story
behind its creation. If it were an app, it’d still be in beta. There are shimmers of poetry from playwright Mickle Maher, and the musical compositions from Merel van Dijk and Anthony Barilla (who front the band Merel & Tony) sidestep musical theater convention in a joyous, finely-drawn manner.
But the true appeal of “Small Ball,” directed by Tamarie Cooper and Jason Nodler, remains elusive. A team of Lilliputians from “Gulliver’s Travel’s,” plus a depressed human named Michael Jordan (Orlanders Jones), who isn’t the real Michael Jordan, are interviewed at a postgame press conference about their first-ever international basketball game. Meanwhile, there’s an offstage rat war, a search for the number five through analytics, a political subplot of Lilliput coming into existence and hints at the importance of literature.
That’s way too much for a single story to handle — and the details are sometimes rendered superficially as a result.
Because the play’s conceit is based around a press conference, the story unfolds in explanatory fashion. Every moment is questioned and discussed explicitly, with the idea that a broad television viewership should understand everything. But, just as explaining a joke kills the humor, explaining the magic of Lilliput strips away the Jonathan Swift-inspired sense of wonder and loss.
The “talk about what just happened” method of laying out the story gives “Small Ball” a circular narrative shape. “First you lose, then they make you talk about the losing,” Jones sings to open the show, towering awkwardly over a small press table built for him by the tiny denizens of the island he calls home. Chuckles ensue, but the response is quiet the second, third and fourth time he repeats the line. While the musical attempts to be funny in both a silly and subtly profound kind of way, its humor is cut down by the story’s insistence upon this kind of repetition.
This is different from, say, Wallace Shawn’s “The Designated Mourner,” which Catastrophic staged in early 2017, a story also in press conference format that doesn’t feel explanatory — and a story about a lack of direction that doesn’t feel directionless itself. “Mourner” pushes forward with new idea after new idea even if its characters remain physically inert. And while movement seems like a requirement in musical theater, Catastrophic’s theatrical oeuvre proves that stagnant characters can still offer suspense and surprise.
What separates “Small Ball” from “Mourner” is the fact that Maher’s musical is dictated by a conventional structure. Michael Jordan loves a Lilliputian named Lilli (a fizzy, splendidly energetic Julia Krohn), and can’t overcome their differences in size at first. Jordan is undermined by the fearmongering Lilliputian Pippin (one of the offstage journalists explains, unnecessarily, that it’s a reference to both the basketball player and the musical), who stokes human-Lilliputian prejudice to escalate toward violence. In other words, there’s a good guy, a pretty girl and a bad guy and all the things you’d expect to happen to the three happen.
Except conventional plots only work when the audience cares about what happens next. This requires an architecture of conflict and growth that “Small Ball” isn’t interested in building during its two hours. Any discursive moment seems beside the point when “Small Ball” never wanted a “point” to begin with. The result is that the musical’s weaker moments feel like a comedy sketch — delightful but half-baked.
Maybe that’s a fine spot right now for a project that nevertheless has more good going for it than bad. The final song, “Don’t Drown,” doesn’t fit the story but soars as a standalone work. About the Lilliputians’ spiritual relationship with death amidst the unrelenting sea (I think), its harmonies are haunting and ungrounded the way the rest of the musical should have been.
“Don’t Drown” isn’t the only subtle moment in the “Small Ball,” which is rich with themes like bigotry, sexual taboo, fiction versus reality, psychological fatigue and isolation. These are the uncooked ingredients of a promising new work. With a refined thesis, those elements could find room to breathe and grow, and “Small Ball” can finally stop pretending it’s the one thing people think it is — a musical about basketball. wchen@chron.com twitter.com/weihuanchen