Somewhere in deepest Africa, about ten thousand years ago, an ancient man proposed a contest: Who the farthest a rock could throw,
And that auspicious occasion, I am happy to report
Marked
the end of our animal nature
For on that day we gave birth to sport.
Jon Spurney's playfully sardonic poem, which introduces Actors Theater of Louisville's Apprentice Anthology at this year's 32nd annual Humana Festival of New American Plays, quickly segues into a withering update as cheerleaders scream, "You suck, you suck, you suck!" and loutish spectators revile a coach (and his mother), an umpire, and a team.
Ah, sportsmanship! We hardly knew ye, as the anthology titled "Game On" makes clear. The sketches are by Zakiyyah Alexander, Rolin Jones, Alice Tuan, Daryl Watson, Marisa Wegrzyn, Ken Weitzman, and Spurney.
Along the way, we witness an appalling "eating contest" in which parents train their offspring to gorge on food to win prizes and acclaim, then a cynical examination of how wives of baseball stars cope with stress caused by women who throw themselves at the husbands, and a self-justifying monologue by a woman who gets mutts from the pound and puts them in dog fights where wagers are made by "fat men with fat wallets and beer cans sweating in their hands."
The old days of marathon dancing for money until partners drop out from fatigue seem relatively tame compared with a sequence that has people volunteering to be shot at for sport in "a supervised setting" for $5000 a round.
Jose Urbino is hilarious in his pantomime tennis routine, and some nasty grade-school girls triumph over boy competitors and the principal with the help of pepper spray wielded by Chronicles Simpson (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Four letter words get a monotonous workout throughout, most especially in an extreme sports sketch (well played by Andy Lutz, Christopher Scheer and Nicholas Combs) that's heavy also on homoeroticism. They so love to dwell on their shuttlecocks.
Spurney in another poem is explicit and amusing about latent homosexuality in sports where "stripped of feminine weakness, men can finally be their best and capture glory on the fields of unbridled manliness."
