CHICAGO — Sustained close friendships take work, especially for men. They’re invariably fragile relationships, easily destroyed by inattention, jealousy, inequalities of wealth and success (or one party’s perceptions thereof), or mutual lack of care. And that’s just the internal stuff: many close pals have been driven apart by external affairs like politics or race or merely that which comes down at the office.
Rajiv Joseph’s “King James” tells a very moving, accessible and openhearted story of two friends in Cleveland who bond and come unstuck over the rise (and subsequent exit and return) of LeBron Raymone James Sr., the pride of northeast Ohio and the Cleveland Cavaliers and for years a symbol of what Cleveland could and could not achieve. The play, which stars the warm and vulnerable duo of Glenn Davis and Chris Perfetti (”Abbott Elementary”), likely will be a big hit for Steppenwolf and rightly so. It is a simple piece of highly commercial theater, short, not overly taxing of its exhausted audience, and surely autobiographical. It’s also full of heart, un-preachy and filled with humor and a healing racial energy. Ergo, it’s very well-timed.
At first glance, the play, which is directed by Kenny Leon with a palpable sense of enjoyment and enhanced by the simple but shrewdly epic settings of Todd Rosenthal, is about guys and sports, an exploration of how the doings of a favorite NBA team (although it could be any team) gives emotionally stunted, or communicatively challenged, men something to bond over, belong to, talk about, feel together.
