Men's Locker Room

I have never been inside a men’s locker room until last night, and it was an experience novel enough to deserve a notice. I was there before the game when guys were changing into their uniforms, during the halftime when they came in from the game -- scratched, bruised, sprained and even injured and bleeding, and after the game when they washed and dressed up to go home. There were 13 of them, with two reserves, rough, rowdy, and rambunctious as hell -- rugby players. I was almost in their midst and found their brawn and horseplaying close enough to be menacing. I was attending The Changing Room, a play by David Storey, performed in vivid realism by the actors under the direction of Terry Schreiber at T. Schreiber Studio, in a perfectly credible replication of a changing room. I don’t generally chose to see a play on the basis of subject interest; if I did, this would have been the first to be eliminated from my list of plays to see. Men in sports by and large put me off; men -- soldiers, cowboys, longshoremen, hard hats, and athletes -- bonding in group and acting rough make me anxious. But I liked another Storey, Home, a droll play about elderly residents of a mental institution socializing in a garden, so, I got a copy of The Changing Room, and read it, and found its first act predictably unappealing; and yet by the third act, despite the lack of narrative development, I was engrossed by the vivid portrayal of all the characters, all men, including, beside the 15 footballers, two trainers, the owner, his clerk, the referee, the masseur, and the cleaner (janitor), and I was eager to see it in performance. The actors were as individualized as the characters; they mastered the North England dialect and performed their roles totally credibly, that is to say, they played with sustained drama that was intimidating and yet riveting. Twenty men on the stage were overwhelming to say the least, especially at arms length from the vantage of my first row seat in the 70-seat venue; but the audience was also predominantly men with only a smattering of women, maybe eight or nine, mostly accompanying a man. There is no question that a good writing and fine performance more than sufficed to overcome my natural discomfort with men en masse.