by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

Behind the scenes at the Sewanee production of the award-winning play “King James” is a triad of conversations: a play about a conversation between two men; art as a conversation with the audience; and a conversation between Sewanee’s Truth, Community Healing, and Transformation Center and the Perspectives in Performance initiative. It all began when Woody Register, director of the Roberson Project and then director of the TCHT, suggested to Chris McCreary, “Find a play!”

McCreary, on the staff of both TCHT and the Roberson Project for Race and Reconciliation, calls his work there, “my day job.” “I’m a theater kid by trade,” McCreary confessed. He has a master’s in directing from Portland College. When he arrived in Sewanee in 2023, he quickly found a home in Sewanee’s Theater Department as a guest artist, doing sound design, and occasional directing. McCreary and Register began discussing how to use art to accomplish TCHT’s mission, bringing people with apparent difference together to talk about issues that apply to all of them.

Coincidentally, professor Sarah Lacy Hamilton, theater, and professor Britt Threatt, English, were engaged in launching the Perspective in Performance project, with a like-minded goal: bringing professional actors to campus and using theater as a tool to foster communal belonging and dialogue across differences. In the first production, last fall’s The Niceties, a black student and her white professor engage in a brave conversation about the student’s paper on slavery.

Rising to Register’s challenge to “find a play,” McCreary zeroed in on “King James.” He pitched the play to the Perspective in Performance (PIP) team, and PIP welcomed “King James” with open arms. “It was a natural fit,” McCreary said.

In 2024, “King James” was nominated as an Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play and won five Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle awards. “King James” opens with a struggling black writer, Shawn, meeting the white bartender, Matt, at Matt’s bar to buy 2003-2004 season tickets for the Cleveland Cavaliers. The two men have only one thing in common, hero worship of the Cavaliers’ star player, LeBron James. Staged as four quarters rather than scenes, the seasons of James’ career are the topics that bind the men’s evolving relationship with each other and themselves.

“Sports are the framework where they communicate,” observed McCreary who directs the play. “We watch them become better at navigating and expressing their emotions, and we watch them struggle to do that and fail to do that. The play mirrors what it’s like to have meaningful a friend in your life, growing independently and growing together at the same time.”

Said critic Frank Scheck in the New York Stage Review commenting on playwright Rajiv Joseph’s gift for nuance, he “beautifully captures the vagaries of friendship, including the power imbalance dependencies that can affect them and the careless misunderstandings that can rupture them.”

“Sports is often seen as the only appropriate outlet for men to express emotions,” McCreary pointed out. “King James” both explodes and embraces that myth. The Sewanee production invites the audience to join the conversation. Between “the quarters,” Equity, Equal Opportunity director and education coordinator Dr. Syliva Gray engages the audience in the discussion.

“It’s not just about the play doing the work,” McCreary stressed. “In these times when things are getting bleaker and bleaker, and we’re getting pushed further into the corners, ‘King James’ reaches a hand out to staying connected and spurs a sense of belonging. And hopefully,” McCreary added, “it inspires people to hold the people in their lives a little bit closer.”

“King James” will be performed at 7:30 p.m., Friday, March 20 through Saturday, March 21, at the Tennessee Williams Center: Studio Theatre. There is no charge for admission.