Review: LOVE ALL at La Jolla Playhouse

As a playwright, Anna Deavere Smith has written a series of remarkable plays blending journalism and drama to examine people and events within their social and cultural relationship to America. Nobody does exactly what Smith does in the way that she does it, and when audiences have been able to see the playwright also perform the work, as she has done with FIRES IN THE MIRROR, TWILIGHT: LOS ANGELES 1992 and LET ME DOWN EASY, the experience is that much more enriching. 30 years after its world premiere, TWILIGHT is now reaching a new set of audiences through a multi-actor version that played at the Mark Taper Forum earlier this year.

The news that, for her latest work, Smith was training her lens on a unique American icon, tennis great Billie Jean King, may have raised some eyebrows while also prompting some big-time anticipation. But as creatively at home as she has been delving into multiple perspectives on the Crown Heights riots of 1991 and the fallout from the Rodney King verdicts of 1992, a traditionally-structured play – even one about a figure as arresting as King - may not be in her artistic wheelhouse. LOVE ALL, directed by Marc Bruni in its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse, is not a love match.

This is disappointing on a number of levels, not the least of which because there may yet be a play about the life of Billie Jean King, a person who hasn’t exactly been shrouded in mystery. In addition to living her life in the public gaze as a star athlete, a feminist and an advocate for equal rights, King has been the subject of at least one documentary and two films in which she was portrayed first by Holly Hunter and then by Emma Stone. Both of those movies focused on King’s celebrated victory over Bobby Riggs, an event that LOVE ALL omits.

No knock on the talent this go-round. Broadway veteran Chilina Kennedy wears King’s lion heart and crusade for fairness (to say nothing of Ann Hould-Ward’s era-evocative costumes) with considerable finesse. But for the bulk of LOVE ALL, Kennedy is playing a figure so unfailingly and predictably heroic that the character feels like she has been sprung from an entry in an 8th grade history textbook. That’s the play’s fault more than Kennedy’s. All three of Smith’s previous plays were both heavily researched and based on dialogue pulled verbatim from hundreds of interviews. I don’t know how much access the playwright had to King, Rosie Casals, Margaret Court and the other important people in King’s history  in crafting LOVE ALL, but if these people actually uttered some of the identity-establishing inanities that come out of their mouths in this play, they should be arrested by the cliché police.

The play begins with a prolog that finds King testifying at a Senate Education Subcommittee hearing on Title IX. (The floor is littered with tennis balls). “I found the girls who go ahead and pursue a career in sports are considered freaks,” King tells the committee. “I think we have to change.” That is one thing I tried to make happen ever since I was 11 years old. I knew that day I wanted to change tennis.” And then we move into the past.

We quickly learn quickly than Billie Jean Moffitt, daughter to working class Southern California parents who don’t entirely “get her,” excels at tennis and just wants to keep getting better until she becomes a champion. Setbacks? Not so many. She quickly embraces people who want to help her in this endeavor, from Wimbledon champion-turned-coach Alice Marble (Bianca Amato) to, once she gets to college, boyfriend-turned-husband-turned-promoter Larry King (John Kroft). And they largely embrace her right back. Larry King especially. Depicted as a marriage based on genuine mutual affection (and the fact that they can help each other’s careers), Larry and Billie Jean overlook each other’s infidelities or the fact that Billie Jean’s attraction to women is not the “identity problem” that Larry is fond of calling it.

The center court metaphor of King’s life as well as her profession extends to the set where Robert Brill’s sleek stadium configuration houses both tennis venues and other). As amidst the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s. Concurrent to her rise are the assassination of both Kennedys and Martin Luther King are assassinated, Kent State, Muhammed Ali refusing to serve in the U.S. military. Concurrently, Billie Jean King sees the disparity between the pay of men and women tennis players, rallies her partners and rivals alike, organizes boycotts and and changes the system.

She does this largely through building good will. LOVE ALL couldn’t be more aptly titled. Smith’s King locks horns with institutional injustice, not so much with people. The people she bests on the court typically become friends, allies and fellow crusaders. Fellow players Rosie Casals (Elena Hurst) and Frankie Durr (Lenne Klingaman) are forever in King’s “court,” along with champion Althea Gibson (Rebecca S’manga Frank) who, because she is African-American, ends up being lauded as a pioneer, but broke and playing slaves in John Wayne movies. The only character who doesn’t join with King’s crusade might be Arthur Ashe (Justin Withers), himself a political animal whose own fight within the world of tennis doesn’t easily align with King’s.

The play’s second act gives the character a bit more shading and is marginally more dramatically interesting.  Even as she is working to become the first woman in sports to earn $100,000 in a year, King undergoes an abortion and starts a relationship with Marilyn Barnett (Kate Rockwell), the hairdresser who helps give her a new look and later becomes her lover and personal assistant. Rockwell’s free-spirited Barnett is someone who opens a door for King, but LOVE ALL doesn’t touch the aftermath (At the end of their seven-year relationship, Barnett publicly sued King, all but forcing her to out herself). King’s realization of the effects that declaring her sexuality would have on her career also feels glossed over, to say nothing of her status as an LGBTQ+ icon.

The play’s epilog, set in the present day, feels more along the lines of what Smith has traditionally done. An actor playing King’s spouse, Ilana Kloss along with Kennedy, Klingaman and Hurst (as themselves) essentially putting a ribbon around King’s achievements and insist that there’s more to come. Perhaps the biographical Billie Jean King play that covers her life post-tennis is in the offing. If LOVE ALL is any indication, Anna Deavere Smith would not be the person to write it.

LOVE ALL plays through July 2 at the La Jolla Playhouse on the campus of UCSD, 2910 La Jolla Village Dr., La Jolla.

Photo of Chilina Kennedy and Justin Withers by Rich Soublet.

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