“Starters,’ the first produced play by Denver’s Jeffrey Wolf, would have benefited from a more thorough development process before being fully staged. But even its flawed premiere by the Denver Repertory Theatre is a welcome breath of fresh air.
“Starters’ launches the Rep’s “season of originals,’ a commitment to staging eight new plays. And it offers uncommon plot fare for the theater: Five high school basketball players have died in a van accident.
Most impressive, director Michael T. Starks employs kids to play kids. You just don’t often see a professional company turning over a difficult piece to a bunch of promising teens. Coming to terms with the deaths of your high school pals is emotional, difficult terrain.
The action opens on a sparse set with the surviving players’ first gathering since the funerals. An amateur documentarian has gained permission to interview these players as they work out whether to play a game scheduled that night. As expected, these scrubs wrestle with their anger, faith, survivors’ guilt and contradictory feelings about finally being elevated to the starting team.
These young actors deserved to be more aggressively directed, but you have to be impressed by their courage. We meet the player-manager, a wall-puncher and a Christian who spouts na ve dogma about being “in a better place.’ Particularly adept are Denver School of the Arts classmates Mitchell Colley as Josh, brother of one of the victims, and Logan Kendig as a player who thinks playing on would be obscene.
Wolf should be commended for taking on such an emotional premise, even if he can’t possibly be expected to fully deliver on it. He offers some lovely moments, though, such as when a teammate accidentally calls Josh by his dead brother’s name. And the line, “We’re in high school; we’re not supposed to be going to each other’s funerals’ – which rings even more numbingly true in the wake of the recent Minnesota school shootings.
But Wolf also must address some fundamental flaws if “Starters’ is to get off the bench again. Most involve repetition and situational credibility. Simply put, the story could never have unfolded the way it is depicted here. With an entire community still processing incalculable grief, permission would never be granted by the school district for an unsupervised film crew to take up residence in the locker room.
His play would be far superior without them anyway. The filmmaker’s presence is just a transparent playwriting device; this guy can simply fire off a tough question whenever it suits the playwright. That’s a writing crutch. Besides, how can kids ever get real with a camera in their faces?
This play should just be a conversation among peers, allowing their thoughts and feelings to surface less artificially. That would also forgive the troubling lack of a team adult presence such as a coach or parent.
There are other problems: Varsity teams travel together on buses, not in separate vans. And we are just supposed to buy it when told that a varsity basketball team with just five players left won’t be restocked with JV and freshmen players. Most head-scratching is one player’s incongruous objection to Josh wearing his own dead brother’s shoes as a tribute. His qualm with that is incomprehensible.
The script also needs more of an evident storytelling arc so the audience knows that we are building toward something more significant than game time. And it could benefit from an infusion of black comedy, which anyone who knows anyone who lived through Columbine will tell you is a necessary survival skill.
Despite these considerable flaws, I could not watch “Starters’ without thinking back warmly to my own days as a high school theater teacher. I constantly bemoaned the lack of substantive scripts available for serious younger actors.
I would have been thrilled to take a shot at “Starters’ with my kids. Even though it’s not destined for Broadway, with some work, it could yet serve a far greater purpose – as a vehicle for high school drama programs around the country.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“Starters’
DRAMA|Denver Repertory Theatre|Written by Jeffrey Wolf|Directed by Michael T. Starks|Starring Mitchell Colley, Rich Sater, Patrick Miranda, Tim Mapoles, Logan Kendig and Tom Jerke|THROUGH MAY 15|7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 6 p.m. Sunday at Playwright Theatre, 2119 E. 17th Ave.; same times April 29-May 15 at 1896 Theatre, 3822 Tennyson St.|1 hour, 35 minutes, no intermission|$8-$15|720-839-4913
