Liam Forde (Luke), Kimberly Gilbert (Viv), Zdenko Martin (Danny), and Michael Glenn (Joe). Photo: Igor Dmitry.
By DCist Contributor Abby Evans
The UK sports comedy Jumpers for Goalposts, currently making its U.S. premiere at Studio Theatre, is an emotionally charged exploration of the otherwise mundane lives of the members of Barely Athletic, a pub soccer team competing in a ‘five-a-side’ LGBTQ league. Hailing from the small East Yorkshire fishing city of Hull, the team competes in a five-week tournament over the course of the play.
Playwright Tom Wells’ show takes a modern spin on the Victorian single-setting drawing room play: The action is completely contained within the dull yellow-and-green-tiled walls of set designer Debra Booth’s dingy locker room. The room, cluttered with deflated and forgotten soccer balls and a dirty shower stall and sink, has seen better days. So have the characters. The exception is the fresh-faced, awkwardly endearing Luke (Liam Forde), the youngest member of the team, who has never strayed far from his library job or from his parents’ dinner table.
Each scene, set between the periodic league matches, reveals and builds on a different cross-section of the entwined lives of the team. Barely Athletic is spearheaded by Viv (Kimberly Gilbert), a mouthy, well-meaning lesbian—deemed too bossy by her previous squad, the Lesbian Rovers. The team is rounded out by Joe (Michael Glenn), Viv’s brother-in-law and the “token straight,” Beardy (Jonathan Judge-Russo), whose frog hat hides more than his hair, and Danny (Zdenko Martin), a coach-in-training with a crush on Luke and a crushing past. The direction by Matt Torney is seamless and doesn’t waste a second on stage, even during scene transitions. His sense of timing allows for the actors to effortlessly jump between comedic and dramatic beats.
What is remarkable about Jumpers is that it isn’t an unusual story. In an interview with The Independent upon the premiere of the show in the UK, Wells explained his approach: “The easiest way to make dramas, it seems, is to go to extremes, but most people just plod along. My friends just have ordinary lives and within that there are moments of elation and genuine struggle.”
His other shows have dealt with similar issues, in a similarly steady-handed way. When speaking about his first play in that same interview, Wells says, “I wanted to write a straightforward play that has gay people in it. The thing about just having one gay character is you can only tell one story, and actually there are lots of different stories.” Jumpers follows a similar model: four of the five characters are gay.
Each character has a working- to middle-class background, and they play soccer together on a rec team; there is nothing extraordinary about these people or the circumstance of their coming together. What makes them noteworthy, though, is the way their characters develop. Luke could easily come across as boring, but he does not. Sure, he catalogs the most banal aspects of his life (“lunch today: jacket potato”) and is so clumsy that he repeatedly has trouble opening the locker room door; but Luke’s lack of experience, his nerves, and his record keeping become the way in which the audience and his love interest fall for him.
Jumpers‘ creative team cannily shows off their ability to take a seemingly mundane situation and create a story that is much more than sport: it is joyful and humiliating, raucous and debilitating. It is the essence of human connection, encapsulated in a dingy locker room in a small town that could be any town.
Jumpers for Goalposts runs at the Studio Theatre through June 21st Tickets are available here
