Boxing fans recognized the real-life events fictionalized in Oliver Mayer's Blade to the Heat right away when it premiered in 1994, but changing social attitudes since then currently permit Michael Cristofer to safely recount the facts in the scandal that forever altered public perceptions of a once-popular pastime. The career of Emile Griffith, between 1958 and 1963, was the quintessential all-American success story. Under the management of factory owner Howie Albert, the milliner from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas was a six-time world champion, commanding fees more than sufficient to support his mother and six siblings, and if members of the athletic community knew of his excursions to gay dance clubs, they kept quiet. (In 1959, even Liberace found it advisable to maintain a veneer of heterosexuality.) Griffith’s good fortune ended in 1962, however, during the preliminary "weigh-in" for a match with Benny Paret, who taunted him with homophobic slurs. That night in the ring, Griffith would not only defeat Paret, but would do so with a barrage of blows—many more than necessary to secure his victory—that would leave his opponent dead, only days later. The mythology of quasi-gladiatorial combat as spectator sport is rife with chest-beating hyperbole but, for Griffith, whose choice of vocation was always based more in his financial responsibilities than in any innate attraction to its practices, this violence far exceeded the limits of the job he had been hired to do. He would continue to work until the neural damage associated with repeated concussions facilitated his retirement in 1977, but would remain forever haunted by the memory of those fatal few seconds when the man who had long declared "I ain't no killer!" succumbed to blind fury. The playbill for this Court Theater production lists not only a fight consultant, but a medical one, as well. Together, Sam Colonna's and William Harper's abilities ensure that Kamal Angelo Bolden and Allen Gilmore, who play, respectively, the young and old Emile—the former reveling in his youthful vitality, the latter racked by dementia, but finding comfort in the arms of his life-partner, sensitively portrayed by Gabriel Ruiz—never spill over into generic stereotype, but retain the gravity appropriate to biographical drama viewed as classical tragedy. Enhancing this ambience is a chorus of auxiliary personae providing a live-action soundscape invoking not only the staccato drumming of fists-on-flesh, but the gentle nature of the child as yet unaware of his destiny as the unwitting instrument of what he most fears.
