Off Off Broadway - The Changing Room

[skynyc]

In 1972, one of the plays competing against That Championship Season for Best Play, and other awards was a little, very naked, slice of life show called The Changing Room. A snapshot of a group of Northern English fellows before, during and after their weekly semi-pro rugby game.

 

It featured a young John Lithgow who won the Tony for his Supporting Role as a simple laborer/rugby player who gets his nose broken and bleeds all over, well, everything.

 

While That Championship Season got mixed reviews uptown this season...the T. Schreiber Studio on W. 26th St. is doing a very handy production of The Changing Room.

 

I went with a friend who went just for the nudity and ended up being very disappointed in the show. I went looking forward to seeing this show and really enjoyed it.

 

There is little plot per se...in fact, it almost plays like a reality show...and I thought to myself...I would be interested to see what happens to these fellows over the course of a season.

 

One reason why my friend didn't like it is the nudity is so natural and germaine that you don't really notice it. The direction (or misdirection as the case may be) actually draws focus away from the boys as they change by having someone start to argue, or start to stretch or something at the point when some of the guys are changing into their jocks. Yes, they all come in in street clothes, which for the most part include boxers, and change into jockstraps.

 

One friend commented that it is a little too obvious that the direction plays down the nudity, but I know he went hoping to see a lot of dick. But there's plenty, and yes, I think that in the locker room, folks would come out of the shower in Act III and be slower about wrapping towels around themselves, and snapping their towels at each other, etc. BUT one of the points of the play is that it is VERY cold, and so it kind of seemed natural that they would be hustling in and out of their clothes.

 

I was sitting in the front row, end seat, right next to the stove and they all spent a lot of time hovering around me "trying to warm up." Literally within inches. I also must admit that some the lovely gym bodies weren't authentic for the period but the others seemed very real. I mean these guys were playing manual laborers...minors, etc who got together on weekends to play semi-pro rugby. The make-up for the bruises was terrific and the scene with the broken nose was VERY bloody. Even in that short bit, you can see how Lithgow could have gotten a Tony. This guy was great.

 

The performances were terrific. The accents were very real and authentic. Only one or two seemed 'actorly'.

Matthew commented that the play didn't show enough differences between the characters, and I think that's somewhat intended. Many of these guys are just cookie cutters of one another...at differnet ages. Work in the mines all day six days a week, play rugby on Sunday. Until you were pretty intimate with them, they would all seem pretty similar...and even so, you could tell the one who wasn't too bright, the one who was a bit of a dandy, the eager newcomer who gets to replace the one who gets hurt. The braggart, and the thug, And of course the Professional...not a laborer; the one gent whose day job was that of a teacher and got more respect from everyone. The old guy who played the Locker Room custodian was terrific, and the rich owner and his team administrator were great. The coach, the doctor, and the manager were also pretty clearly delineated. It would be impossible to really introduce 22 characters in a two hour play that had two intermissions, but what was introduced was a way of life...a snapshot of the one day off a week that these guys got.

 

And part of me had to wonder if we got to see them next week, what would be different. Would the guy who won big at the track have wasted all his earnings? Would the guy who was hurt be back? Would the guy who had a big date be talking about it?

 

I liked it and not just because there were a lot of asses and a couple frontal shows. Honestly, you almost didn't notice.

[+ beethoven]

I was strangely unmoved by this play, which I saw in 1972. As skynyc said, with all those characters, it's hard to focus on one or two. However, I wish the author had done that. As he noted, there was no plot, and is almost a reality show. Yes, the acting was good, but there was no substance to the play. A basic formula of playwiring is to get your character up a tree in Act I, throw rocks at him in Act II, and get him down in Act III. There was little conflict or characterization here, and while I enjoyed it as theater, it left me with very little.

That said, anything T. Schreiber does is worthy of support, even if they don't hit a home run every time. And there is NOWHERE in New York that you can see theater like this -- consistently well done -- for $25.

 

BTW, I loathed "That Championship Season." but I said that here before. Acting was competent, but they had NOTHING to work with. This may have been relevant in 1972 (and I saw it then), but it's a boring dinosaur now.