The Pass
John Donnelly’s "The Pass," which arrived at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2014 and now makes its American premiere at La MaMa, is the sort of play whose subject seems almost unnervingly well chosen for the present moment. Professional soccer has never been more culturally omnipresent in the United States, while the question of what elite sports permit—or refuse to permit—men to reveal about themselves has acquired an urgency that extends far beyond the playing field. Yet Donnelly’s play is not a consoling story about athletes discovering the liberating possibilities of love. It is considerably darker, and more interesting: a study of a man who has so thoroughly converted himself into a marketable public object that, by the time he is offered the possibility of recovering his private self, he may no longer know what that self is. Across three hotel rooms and twelve years, "The Pass" traces the wreckage produced when ambition, masculinity, desire, celebrity, and shame become so thoroughly entangled that success itself begins to resemble a form of imprisonment. [more]
