In his Scriptnotes podcast writer John August said (paraphrased) “I’ve gotten used to the idea that I’ll be working on some version of Big Fish until the day I die,” referencing rewrites he did to the musical in advance of its London premiere. Theater writers, as opposed to screenwriters or radio writers, have a rare, continuing opportunity: their works are always reinterpreted, so they are given many chances to rewrite them to changing times.

And honestly, even more than the script of The Indoor Sport (which is fine, better than fine even,) that is what intrigues me about this play. It was originally written in 1953, revised in 1968, and revised again in 1976 (which is the version I read.) The play is about marriage, and its about men and women and anyone who knows anything about history knows that between 1953 and 1976 the role of women, and the attitudes of society changed prodigiously.

The version I read has a lot of the sixties and seventies in it, the conclusions we reach and the attitudes of the characters hinge on the social ideas of the time, and I’d really love to see what the original version was like, because I can’t imagine it was the same.

Anyhow, we should probably talk about the play, at some point:

Jack Perry is a currently famous fighter, so I can’t find any production photos from the play. Enjoy this creation of Ideogram and your upcoming local thespments

The Indoor Sport is a comedy about an important 24-hours in the lives of a married couple- Gary and Sheila. Gary is a cargo pilot who is gone for weeks at a time, and in fact has been gone seven months when the play begins. Sheila is fed up with him and has been seeing Jeff, a high school friend who used to go out with her sister Ellen. The core comedy revolves around Gary, very much in love with his wife, reacting to this news and trying to reverse its course, while Sheila acts aghast that Gary would have any problem with what’s going on, and Jeff being a real stand up guy.

Additional characters include Ellen, Sheila’s older sister, a Madison avenue copywriter and career gal with no marriage of her own; and Chip, a drunk bachelor reporter that Gary gives rides to.

Strictly speaking this is a standard, well-built wordplay comedy: the situations and jokes hold up, the action is clean, and if you like shows like Lend Me a Tenor, Boeing Boeing, or Black Comedy you’ll find a lot to like here.

It even has a pretty nifty surprise, all things considered: the beta couple in this show is Chip and Ellen, two people who profess to not need relationships and are inextricably drawn to each other, until Ellen leaves Chip at the last moment in a big, funny moment of weakness and extreme commitment to character flaws, I dug it.

The play has two major problems, one, an unforced error, the other a big ol’ Taming of the Shrew-esque knot born out of trying to merge 70’s reality with a 50’s plot or the author’s own sexism (or both! Why limit ourselves)?

Before we talk about either let’s recap the plots, the stakes, and the potential outcomes:

At the top of the show Gary hasn’t been home for seven months and that is the core rift in his and Shelia’s relationship: she wants him to stay home, he needs to be in the sky. We learn early on that in addition to running cargo Gary takes extra flying jobs for fun and cash, in fact we are told that the last extra job Gary took was filming the coastline for a movie, and it is said in no uncertain terms that he did it cause he thought it’d be a gas to be in a movie, and that if he didn’t he would “have got home months ago” (emphasis mine.)

It’s not hard to see what a conventional story would do with this setup: the happy ending is Gary and Sheila getting back together after Gary learns that part of taking care of his family is thinking about them, and that he and Sheila will find a new balance in their lives.

Instead, when Sheila and Chip (the only other character fully on Gary’s side) are alone he guilt-trips her by pointing out that many of the extra jobs Gary does are humanitarian: flying medicine where it’s needed, rescuing people from fires/floods, etc. and Sheila realizes that Gary’s job really is that important and that she should be more forgiving of his absence. In 2024 we see this as a bit of a regressive, if not an outright sexist, ending, but at least it could have been softened if the mission we hear about at the top comports with the ones Chip tells Sheila about at the end! It’s a shockingly poor bit of craftsmanship.

The end of the play has all of these unfortunate holes: the set-piece scene towards the end of act II is a painful conversation about what men and women expect from each other, and while the characters are definitely sexist, the conclusion of the show does little to disavow the notion that it is what the author believes too: in a play with three career women, none of whom could be called meek, all of them end the show basically admitting that all they really want to do is take care of a man.

Ellen, who has made no secret of being a little disappointed she isn’t married through the play, but also is quick-witted, sardonic, and not shown to be sad about her career success, has a long monologue about how her life is empty and that she made the wrong choice, and what she wants to do is give up on the world of advertising and take care of a man.

This would be disappointing, but was almost saved with Sheila briefly looking like, out of Gary and Jeff she was going to choose “none-of-the-above” and they’d basically do a swap, but she also submits to Gary in the end. It’s a shocking turn for a play that up to that moment seemed egalitarian and fair.

And if ALL THAT wasn’t enough, it’s probably about three hours long, so sadly The Indoor Sport fumbles at the end of the game, and unless Conchord Theatricals lets me rewrite it, it will remain benched until it goes out of copyright sometime around 2989.