"Man In The Ring", Emile Griffith's Title Match with Life
Calderwood Pavilion at the BCA
Tremont Street,
Boston, MA
December 16, 2018
"Man In The Ring" is a poignantly sad, strangely sweet story of a man whose hands could make a beautiful hat for a show room and deliver thunderous haymakers in the boxing ring. It will stay riveted in your memory long after you've left the theater.
It’s the story of two Emile Griffiths told in parallel, opening with scenes of the 70 year old mentally demolished (pugilistic dementia) older Emile searching for a shoe then ping ponging back and forth to the younger Emile, the kid filled with dreams who immigrated to New York from St. Thomas, V.I.
It’s painful to watch young off-the-boat Griffith enter the world of boxing when his employer in the hat making district discovers how strong and muscular he is and brings him to the gym to become a fighter. He had fast hands and could box - a natural.
We know where the play is heading and can’t close our eyes as we know how those dreams of fame on the baseball diamond or as a designer on the floor of a hat making business give way to a life of boxing that will give him the fame then crush him for being open about the kind of man he is. This is the 1950s and 60s. Homosexuality was taboo. Bisexuality was unthinkable. Combine that with the fact we're talking about a world champion boxer and it strains credulity. And it's true.
The characterizations of Griffith (1938-2013) lean on liltingly accented island English, poetic and filled with colorful local colloquialisms that eerily underscore what happens in Griffith’s life. The recurring rhymes of childhood songs that Griffith faintly remembers, songs that teach them how to behave in male/female relationships, hold the both the play and the older Griffith together as his brain struggles to focus on where he put his shoes, and wracks him with nightmares about a 1962 prize fight for the welterweight championship in which he killed Benny Paret with a brutal onslaught of punches. Paret had made fun of Griffith's sexuality at the public weigh in before the title fight. We are left to decide whether or not Griffith intentionally savagely beat the man senseless.
The six time world champion made and lost a fortune. A scene as he sells the belts he won as a world champion in the welterweight and middleweight classes to make ends meet breaks your heart. The champion is an emotional wreck, relentlessly remorseful for the fatal night in the boxing ring and deeply yearning for forgiveness and understanding for the life he chose to live.
'I killed a man, and the world forgave me, yet I loved a man, and the world wants to kill me," Griffith says uncomprehendingly.
He never tried to hide his sexuality and hardly seemed to understand his bisexual nature himself. Considering the era in which he lived, his openness, naive or intentional, was as brave as his valor in the ring. The result tormented him.
From the very first moments on stage, John Douglas Thompson and Kyle Vincent Terry inhabit the roles of the elder and younger Griffith with the magnetism of the man’s personality and the irreconcilable contradictions of his lifestyle. Luis (Victor Almanzar) as the elder Griffith’s lover and caretaker is tender, gentle, and the only link Griffith has with the real world. The portrayal of Griffith''s mother, who emigrated to the United States years before Griffith and prostituted herself to make a living is two dimensional. She clearly has no idea how to nurture her son but is happy take his money as he rises to fame. The cruel aunt in St. Thomas she asked to care for him was cruel and devoid of any love. For nurturing and any kind of parental love (his father was long gone after he was born), Griffith began life with a mandatory eight count. Luis is the only constant source of love Griffith may have known his whole life.
How is it possible to make the life of an immigrant bisexual boxer a compelling piece of theater? Director Michael Grief, playwright Michael Cristofer, and music director Michael McElroy know exactly how they want the play to unfold - using imaginatively staged and illuminated vignettes that gradually fit together the people and the pieces of the puzzle that was Griffith's life.
The boxing scenes, strobe lights popping to show in freeze frame scenes of his knockout punches in his fights are starkly effective as are scenes of the champion patronizing gay bars. Even in 2018, the bar scenes contradict every notion we have of men in the prize fighting business, let alone world champions prize fighters.
The clever two-tier stage setting features a place for musicians to play the melodies of children’s songs as the boxer brings them into focus and a huge screen backdrop that shows crawls of headlines from Griffith's career and brief black and white video clips of Griffith during arc of his brilliant ring career from 1958 to 1977 (85 Wins [23 Knockouts], 24 Defeats [2 Knockouts, 2 Draws).
The man was either way ahead of his time or recklessly self-destructive. In his boxing career, he was willing to take punches to wait for an opening to knock out an opponent. In the ring of life, he absorbed the pain of being battered for who he was. Years after his death, this powerful, deeply realized portrayal of the most complex world champion boxer the world has ever known awards him a TKO over the misery he suffered in life.
Griffith's bisexuality may have been an open secret to the closely knit world of boxing but was never a story newspapers would run at the time. A meeting with Benny Paret's son when Griffith struggles for the words to ask for forgiveness at the closing moments of the play puts the entire audience into a sob mode. This is not a theatrical device. It happened.
The single bed on the set is a metaphor for the island on which Griffith finds himself stranded with only memories to keep him company.
Excellent review ! I was moved by your review. I would be a sobbing mess in an audience.
Thanks .
Ann
Posted by: Ann Baker | December 21, 2018 at 02:26 PM
Lovely writing, as usual, Paul.
Really nice!
Posted by: Mary Seppi | December 21, 2018 at 05:46 PM
Powerful!
Posted by: Susan M. Bennett | December 21, 2018 at 05:47 PM