INTERVIEW: Relive the tennis match between Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs at 59E59

The new off-Broadway play Balls, currently running at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan, is a production focused on duality. At the center of the drama is the historic tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, which was recently featured in the movie Battle of the Sexes. However, behind the scenes of the new play, produced by One Year Lease Theater Company and Stages Repertory Theatre, are duo playwrights and duo filmmakers.

Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery wrote the piece, which continues through Feb. 25, and Ianthe Demos and Nick Flint direct. The duality on stage, based on the duality in real life, is matched by the duality back stage.

This was part of the plan from the early days of the play’s development.

“I’m the co-artistic director of One Year Lease Theater Company, and we commissioned this project and recommended the two playwrights, Kevin Armento and Bryony Lavery, collaborate on it,” Flint said in a recent phone interview. “We thought it would be an interesting way to pair the playwrights in that reflection of the gender-age gap, and then we went into about an 18-month development process with the playwrights.”

The theater company behind Balls is physically driven, so from the get-go, they were interested in re-staging the entire tennis match, which took place in 1973 at the Houston Astrodome. Riggs, spouting hurtful sexist remarks at female athletes, challenged King to a tennis match before thousands of people in person and on TV. They were both tennis champions, and Riggs, almost as a publicity stunt, wanted to see if the best female athlete could beat him.

“So we ended up taking hundreds of hours of research to document all of the physical movements of the tennis, and meanwhile the playwrights were working on developing the script, which has multiple narratives,” the co-director said. “So basically the production uses re-staging the original match in real time as kind of the heartbeat of the production, and then the script itself has multiple narratives going on at the same time, which sort of in a way shoot off from all of the ideas that the match ended up representing about gender equality and women’s rights and then by extension civil rights.”

The creative team started working on the play before hearing about Battle of the Sexes, which stars Emma Stone and Steve Carell. Perhaps this story has proved so popular because of the current headlines in the country. In 2018, the story of King’s fight against gender discrimination in sports has taken on a new light and a new importance. Balls can also be viewed as a response to the election of President Donald Trump and the continued struggle for women to gain equality in the workforce, sports and society.

“We were actually in a workshop a day after the election,” Flint remembered. “You know, the cast is 50 percent female. My co-director is female. We have a lot of women in the company, and almost everyone was in tears the day after the election. … We thought Hillary [Clinton] was going to win obviously, and we thought that made sense with what the play is about because Billy wins the match. It was such a shock, and we were sort of like, what does this actually mean now with this having happened, especially because of the nature of Trump and the questions about his sexism that came up. So it was a very interesting moment.”

One of the goals of the play is to answer the difficult question of how far the country has come since 1973. The King-Riggs match was a flashpoint, a metaphor for struggle and acceptance. Flint called the match a “visceral moment” that represented a large step toward gender equality.

“I think it’s coming at a really interesting time when all of that stuff has been kind of thrown in the air again,” he said.

The challenge, of course, was recreating the entire match on stage. Flint and the creative team were after preciseness and accuracy. They wanted every single move from King and Riggs to be part of the play.

“We had to develop an entirely new, quite scientific process of doing that,” the co-director said. “We call them the tennis maps where it’s a diagram that shows exactly where the ball went, what kind of shot the player hit and where the point ended, so we had to do all of that documentation as well as we did a second-by-second documentation of the 80-minute match, when they would scratch their head or adjust their glasses, that kind of thing. … We had to kind of start with everything, all of that data, and then figure out how to make it theatrically interesting because the tennis is obviously played in the theater without a ball.”

The actors in the show needed to learn so much choreography, and they needed to bring these movements to life with an imaginary ball. To help them with that bit of stagecraft is a crew member who has a digital keypad that creates sound effects every time the ball is hit.

“She’s creating the ball sounds separately for Billy and separately for Bobby, and all the sound effects go to the speakers on the correct side of the stage,” Flint said. “And in our staging of it, the tennis match actually is kind of continually rotating, so the perspective changes. … So that’s been enormously complicated because she also has to learn the whole match to know exactly what’s going to happen next. … It was a very exciting discovery that when it’s that accurate your brain kind of fills in the gap, and you start to forget that there’s no ball, which is a very exciting discovery for us.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Balls is currently playing at 59E59 Theaters in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.