Theater Review: “Lombardi,” by Eric Simonson

I really would have kicked myself if I hadn’t seen Lombardi at Broadway's Circle in the Square before it closed this weekend. No, I couldn’t compare it to the classic dramas (particularly in its early history) that the theater once premiered (notably Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night).

But, as a graduate of St. Cecilia’s High School in Englewood, N.J., where legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi got his start, I have been fascinated by his life story. Moreover, as an admirer of the source for Eric Simonson’s play, David Maraniss’ marvelous biography When Pride Still Mattered, I couldn’t help but wonder how the material of his life had been transformed.

By the time I was done sitting through the 90 minutes (without intermission) of this play, I could only liken myself to Packer opponents as they faced the team’s famed “power sweep” in their '60s glory days. I knew more or less what was coming, but the whole was so flawlessly executed that I was powerless to withstand it.

(Incidentally, to any other alumni from my high school who might read this: Yes, St. Cecilia’s is named several times in the course of the play. I managed to restrain myself each time it was mentioned.)

Simonson has chosen for the central situation of his play the 1965 season. The Pack have finished out of the running for the last two seasons, after having won two straight. For a ferociously driven coach who has been preaching the importance of winning since he first came to Green Bay in 1959, this situation is not only unacceptable but physically sickening.

Into the scene steps the (fictional) Look Magazine reporter Michael McCormick, appearing at the Lombardi home to write an in-depth profile of the coach. McCormack first tries to establish a relationship with a coach angry over being burned by another magazine writer the prior year, then has to fend off Lombardi’s heavy-handed attempt at news management.

McCormick is more than a stand-in for the audience in coming to understand the famous coach. He’s also a means for exploring one of the show’s themes: the problematic search for fathers. The reporter is following the same career path of his late father, but he had trouble seeing eye to eye with the latter while he was alive.

In a sense, McCormick reenacts the same struggle with Lombardi that he had with his parent: the need to win approval while still establishing his own identity and independence. While that struggle is eternally relevant, it was particularly so during the “generation gap” of the 1960s.
Lombardi himself has his own struggles as a parent. His total concentration on his team makes him a de facto father figure for the players he treats with tough love, but at home he is never there enough for his son and daughter.

It’s a difficult position to have to, in effect, be a dramatic device, but as McCormick, Keith Nobbs acquitted himself well in making his character three-dimensional. He also brought the house down with what might be the funniest moment in a play filled with laughs: his dead-on impersonation of how Lombardi might have turned out if, instead of continuing his stalled quest for an NFL coaching job, he had accepted a quieter, more family-friendly job as a bank officer (“You want a loan? You think you deserve a loan?”)

I can think of other events in the life of Lombardi more inherently dramatic than the pivotal week dramatized here (the Packers’ classic “Ice Bowl” playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys comes instantly to mind). But these might have missed two of the cornerstone figures of the Packers, their backfield of “Thunder and Lightning” (fullback Jim Taylor and halfback Paul Hornung), both gone late in the Lombardi regime.

Bill Dawes brought a welcome lightness of touch to Hornung, a player with a burning desire to score, on and off the field (in one scene, he chuckles that he has to leave, as he has a stewardess waiting for him).

But Chris Sullivan also delivered in an infinitely dicier role, as the hulking, monosyllabic Taylor. For much of the play, Simonson's script depicted the Hall of Fame running back as tough as a bull and as unthinking (he calls every male he meets “Roy” because he can’t remember their real names).

Yet three-quarters through, Sullivan made the most of his longest set of lines in the play, pouring out the back’s mixture of pride and anger in arguing unsuccessfully with Lombardi for a salary that would not only compensate him adequately for past accomplishments but also for the endless injuries and physical punishment he absorbed stoically for years.

Dan Lauria, most familiar to fans as Kevin Arnold’s father on the comedy The Wonder Years, brought out nearly every facet of this most complicated of human beings--in the words of McCormack, “the most imperfect perfect man I ever knew.” A former high-school football coach himself, he understood how to convey the combination of intelligence, charm and sheer bluster Lombardi needed to transform a team of losers into a squad with five NFL titles and two Super Bowl championships. The performance alternated, in reenacting the coach's legendary training-camp rants and exhortations, some of the most astonishing displays of lung power in this or any other Broadway season with displays of unconscious vulnerability. (Stress made Lombardi continually sick, triggering the colon cancer that struck him down at only age 57.)

Fully a match for Lauria was Judith Light, whose role as wife Marie Lombardi was a far cry from “Who’s the Boss?” Drawing herself up to her full height, filling the room with the most gin-soaked, smokiest voice this side of Elaine Stritch, she could have settled for the kind of tough, wisecracking woman in which Eve Arden specialized in the Forties. But she let you see the fragility that the ripostes can’t fully disguise—devotion to a man whose commitment to winning left his wife in the middle of nowhere, with precious little comfort except for the martinis that leave her increasingly unsteady. Light fully deserved her recent Tony Award nomination.

I’ve never made it out either to the Pro Football Hall of Fame or the Packers’ Lambeau Field, but I felt as if I were approaching the next best thing in the mini-shrine to the Lombardi-era Packers erected in the theater’s lobby. It was filled with all kinds of collectible items, including the jerseys worn by Taylor, Hornung, quarterback Bart Starr and linebacker Ray Nitschke, footballs signed by the Packers, and Super Bowl rings (including the image accompanying this post).
Lombardi was hardly groundbreaking theater, but in its rich exploration of the complicated coach that McCormick mourns as “the most imperfect perfect man I ever knew,” it was a solid and moving character study. Like the Maraniss biography, it kept in exquisite balance its view of a man consumed by a pursuit of perfection he knew he could never achieve.