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The Last Match brings the passion and pace of professional sports to the stage in what may seem like an unlikely marriage between the world of athletics and the world of theatre. But this pairing isn’t quite as uncommon as it might appear. Sports have been a source of inspiration for playwrights for decades -- from Clifford Odets’s 1937 boxing drama Golden Boy to George Abbott, Douglass Wallop, Richard Adler, and Jerry Ross’s 1955 baseball musical Damn Yankees to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton’s 2000 football musical The Beautiful Game. Bringing a sporting event to the stage, however, is not quite the same as the more ubiquitous trend of bringing it to the screen -- and “sports plays” often take a much different shape than do “sports films.” The fact that sports and theatre are both live entertainment often makes the combination of the two events a more complicated and nuanced endeavor than it may seem.

Many a theatre practitioner has bemoaned the theatre’s inability to mimic the heightened spontaneity of sports. For all the similarities between theatre events and sporting events , sports do generally have the theatre beat in terms of the sheer unpredictability of outcome. What’s the benefit, then, in putting sports onstage in a “scripted” environment? Much recent commentary on “sports theatre” has criticized shows for attempting to capture the moment-to-moment excitement of actual gameplay and falling short. Indeed, it’s difficult to fake the excitement of a sporting event authentically when the final outcome is predetermined. Plays and musicals about sports, then, tend to have their best moments when they resist the temptation to stage the actual games in full and instead do what theatre does best: focus on the people.

The mechanics of what makes a good “sports play” aside, sports are certainly getting their share of time in the spotlight in today’s theatrical landscape. The Last Match is only one of several major recent productions that have brought the drama of sports onstage and explored the nature of competition and the often invisible and controversial intricacies of the athletics industry. Below are a few notable examples of recent plays that join The Last Match in the genre of “sports theatre.”

Zoë Winters, Wilson Bethel, Alex Mickiewicz and Natalia Payne in The Last Match. Photo by Joan Marcus.

The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe

A Finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves dramatizes the dynamics of a teenage girls’ soccer team as their competing desires for success, social status, and validation boil to the surface over the course of a pre-game warmup. Fueled by all the energy and competition of an actual soccer game, the team’s frenetic conversation escalates from casual schoolyard gossip to a place of very real danger.

Colossal by Andrew Hinderaker

Andrew Hinderaker’s Colossal brings all the adrenaline of a football game to the stage. Featuring full football uniforms, a live drumline, a working scoreboard, and precise choreography that transforms the chaos of a play on the field into an elaborate dance, Colossal follows a gay college football player who suffers irreparable damage to his spinal cord during a game. Through the eyes of a gay man in a culture of hypermasculinity, Colossal explores the more drastic prices we pay in the name of career.

X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story) by KJ Sanchez and Jenny Mercein

KJ Sanchez and Jenny Mercein’s X’s and O’s (A Football Love Story) investigates stories of degenerative brain diseases in former professional football players. Through the real-life stories of former players and their friends and families, many of whom formed the cast of the production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, X’s and O’s ruminates on the often invisible costs of America’s most popular form of entertainment.

The Last Match opens at the Laura Pels Theater on October 24, 2017. For tickets and information, please visit our website here.