Wilson Bethel and Alex Mickiewicz star in Anna Ziegler'sThe Last Match, directed by Gaye Taylor Upchurch, at Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre.
(© Joan Marcus)

 

                                                          By Eugene Paul

 

Tim Mackabee’s stunningly consuming setting so dominates and abets Anna Ziegler’s metaphorically infused play, placing you deep in the tennis match of her take on the lives of Tim and Sergei, ferocious tennis competitors, that you remain absorbed even when the playwright veers away from the tensions of their match. You stay in the game. You stay in that stadium under the fierce, involving lights Bradley King has designed day and night, through the scores on the talley boards, through the churning ruminations of aging, undefeated tennis star Tim (pitch perfect Wilson Bethel) and his wired challenger, Sergei (febrile Alex Mickiewicz), ten years his junior and charged to be in these semifinals with his idol.  Sergei  has never won a finals and here he is facing Tim, who has never lost one. His hungry wife, Galina (fine Natalia Payne) giddy with an all but avaricious excitement, is beside herself.

 

Not so, Tim’s wife Mallory (solid Zoe Winters), also cheering from the side lines. She’s steeped in tennis, she knows the territory, the claims, the drains on their bodies, their minds, their lives. Playwright Ziegler makes that plain in the vignettes she has blended into the main tennis action of her play and, indeed, in these back stories from Tim’s and Mallory’s life together and Sergei and Galina’s life together Ziegler gets us into the minds of Tim and Sergei even as they are doing battle on the court, the ever present tennis court. Tennis and life are one.

 

Which makes the exchanges between these two men delivered right out to us in the audience vitally important to the game. And if you listen hard enough these volleys are harsher in playwright Ziegler’s dialogue than in the texture of the game with which director Gaye Taylor Upchurch has chosen to envelope the play. Listen to Galina, too, and she’s harder than the charmingly overexcited babe she presents.  Galina is cheering on her ticket to the Good Life. Director Upchurch seems to have gentled her down. But there’s no getting away from it,  Tim is fighting for his reputation, his mark on the game, fighting his hurting body, fighting the specter of actually losing. Sergei, exulting in his winning streak, fights his long entrenched doubts about being worthy of reaching so high.

 

We, too, are watching the score board, even as we sympathize with tennis wife Mallory who knows that she doesn’t come first, tennis does. Does she want this win as desperately as her husband does? She can live with a loss but can she live with a husband who cannot bear the thought, at least at this point?

 

And while we follow them, we find ourselves wondering where will that something new, that something revelatory arise to hit us.  Were it not for the absolutely splendid production, this all encompassing setting, that  exceptional lighting, those sharply aware costumes by Montana Bianco, that nailing sound design by Bray Poor, what would be so special about playwright Ziegler’s play? Has it given us a deeper understanding of tennis?  Or these characters?  Or ourselves? How is it going to end?

 

 No matter how it ends, what will it say to us? And, over all, is this the actual intention of the play, to  lead us into questioning these and perhaps edgier thoughts for us to carry away? This is hardly the first play to try to draw the analogy of tennis to what we call our lives. Nor are their histories, what we glean of them, Tim and Mallory, Sergei and Galina, as couples, as individuals,  more than familiar, hardly electrifying. Our enjoyment is of the whole, theater experience.  That is this presentation’s success.

                                                         

The Last Match. At the Laura Pels Theatre, 111 West 46^th Street near Sixth Avenue.  Tickets:  $79. 212-279-1300. 95 min. Thru Dec 24.