A life lived at deuce

October 24, 2017

The game of tennis has always served the arts brilliantly.

Combining the elegance of chess and the brutality of boxing – or should that be the brutality of chess and the elegance of boxing? – tennis relies on an individualism that appeals to the writer and a balletic motion that captivates visual artists.

The Roundabout Theatre Company production of Anna Ziegler’s new play “The Last Match” – which opens Tuesday, Oct. 24 at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre in Manhattan – does not stint on the visual. ...

‘Damn Yankees’ again

October 15, 2017

I was a child of the 1960s when rooting for the New York Yankees was not like rooting for the proverbial U.S. Steel but more like rooting for a company forever on the brink of going belly up. How bad were the Yanks of the late ’60s and early ‘70s? Put it this way: The team would have some of the extra players dress in street clothes and fill in the seats behind home plate at Yankee Stadium to make it look like someone was actually at the games. (Ah, the Horace Clarke Era. No offense to Horace, a lovely, hard-working and decidedly mediocre second baseman who became the face of those wilderness years, 1967-73.)

We can remember those days fondly, because as every Yankee fan knows the trajectory of the Bronx Bombers – like President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s view of the arc of civilization – has, despite some zigzagging, been ever upward. ...

Men at deuce

October 10, 2017

In Anna Ziegler’s new play “The Last Match,” opening in Manhattan Oct. 24, she uses the rivalry between two male tennis players – think an American Roger Federer and an early Novak Djokovic – to tell the story of life at deuce, never advancing without retreating, never retreating without advancing.

Perhaps the reason the world is at deuce is because the people who created it – primarily men – are at deuce. (It’s the score in tennis, at 40-40, from which the player must win two points in order to win the game.)

Think about it: Most of the world’s great creations were made by men (as men like to point out as a way to explain their superiority to women). All but 49 of the 923 Nobel laureates have been men.

And yet – you know there’s always an “and yet” – they have consistently destroyed the worlds they have created. You could say that this is the human condition, but in fact it’s the male condition. ...