For millennia men have been biffing each other for sport with their bound or gloved fists. The ancient Sumerians, Minoans, Greeks, and Romans socked one another in the heads and torsos during public contests of strength and skill. And out of all that, we ended up with modern regulated boxing in18^th century England.

For as long a time, artists and writers have depicted the brutal ambiguities of pugilism – its heroics and corruptions; its aesthetics and injuries. A 1^st century B.C. Greek bronze portrays a boxer with muscular body and battered face. Ancient vases and frescos illustrate the recognizable sport. And then there are the superb modern oil paintings of George Bellows (1882-1925).

As for writers, Homer described boxing in his "Illiad." In recent times, authors from George Bernard Shaw to Joyce Carol Oates have depicted prizefighters in fiction. Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and Thom Jones went so far as to venture into the ring themselves as well as to write about it. And ever since the inception of cinema, the boxing movie has long been and still is a thriving film genre.

In theatre, the classic play about a prizefighter is Clifford Odets’ 1937 drama "Golden Boy." New Village Arts has mounted a smashing production of it, directed by Joshua Everett Johnson who, as an actor also, comes close to stealing the show with his own performance in the supporting role of the slimy hit-man Eddie Fuseli.

The main character, however – the hero of the play – is the golden boy himself, Joe Bonaparte, portrayed with sullen sensitivity by Michael Zlotnik. And Joe Bonaparte is little less than a modern avatar of the proud and noble young hero of legend whose triumph and doom are one.

Mid-20th century American playwrights – Eugene O’Neill, Maxwell Anderson, Arthur Miller – sometimes seemed to be laboring to create a kind of a contemporary and local equivalent to classical tragedy for the common man. O’Neill had New England farmers defying the Fates and Furies with their unlicenced desires; Anderson’s "Winterset" showed star-crossed lovers facing with doomed poetic pleadings the fusillades of gat-wielding New York gangsters; and Miller repeated with choric insistence that attention must be paid to the flawed fall from grace of a common traveling salesman or a Brooklyn longshoreman obsessed with his young niece.

But Clifford Odets (1906-1963), in what some consider his best play, with apparent effortlessness blends aspects of the legendary, the tragic, the poetic, and the American demotic. Young Joe Bonaparte, combining intelligence, talent, youth, strength, grace, and willful pride in fairly equal measures, celebrates his majority by rejecting the 21^st birthday gift of a precious violin from his Italian immigrant father Mr. Bonaparte (Eric Poppick), turning away forever from the prospect of a musical vocation. Instead Joe, with unwavering brash confidence, launches a career in the ring that bids fair to carry him to a lightweight championship.

Yet one senses from the outset the doom that preys upon heroes, stemming from fatal flaws, from "some vicious mole of nature." With Joe Bonaparte a slight physical defect – an ocular strabismus, seen by other characters but invisible to the audience, that brands him as "cockeyed" – seems emblematic of his deeper flaws of pride, of rejecting his spiritual gifts of music in favor of physical rewards. It’s as if Orpheus had turned away from lyre and song.

Schiller in his "Ode to Joy" writes of a hero running joyfully towards victories – "Freudig wie ein Held zum Siegen." But from what we know about heroes – Achilles, Cuchulain, Siegfried – archetypal heroism also demands an early death. The lyric might as truthfully read "wie ein Held zum Todt."

All this stuff may inform plot, themes, and textures of "Golden Boy," but does so gracefully and unobtrusively beneath the drama’s surface. What comes to the fore are a terrific story and vivid characters. When I first read the script, I was caught up by the drama, the people, and the language on the page. Occasionally, however, a line would pop out that seemed like it might be a bit too corny, too much of its late Thirties period. Yet on the stage, in the actors’ mouths all flows naturally and swiftly. Even the Italian dialect of Joe’s father, Mr. Bonaparte, in the excellently sympathetic and understated performance of Eric Poppick, is barely noticeable save as spontaneous adjunct of character. The same things happens when Shakespeare is done correctly and well: period language, poetic figures, even comic dialects (be they French, Welsh, or whatever) all recede behind vivacious personalities and hypnotic storytelling.

Zlotnick’s Joe Bonaparte is an aloof and romantic figure (in the Byronic sense) who attracts and repels at the same time. Most of the major characters want a piece of him. Even Poppick’s wise and generally forbearing father cannot quite let his young hero son go to find his own destiny. But Joe stands slightly apart from them all, preserving his essential inner self, inscrutable to the last.

First – all in obvious or subtle ways trying to get their hooks into Joe – come the sometimes comical trio of Moody (Manny Fernandes), Joe’s temperamental and self-dramatizingly long-suffering manager; Tokio (Jeff Anthony Miller), his crusty and taciturn older trainer; and Roxy Gottleib (Eddie Yaroch), a hilariously loudmouthed investor. With them, but herself nearly as aloof as Joe, is Moody’s younger girlfriend, Lorna Moon, played by Amanda Sitton with a sensuously arched back and an arch attitude that hints of a hard past that has given her smarts and cynicism beyond her years. Set to the task of manipulating Joe for the others, Lorna is instead eventually drawn to his offish charm.

Most sinister, however, is Johnson’s Eddie Fuseli – a figure of the type that Gore Vidal has labeled the "fag villain." (For other such fictional and criminal examples from the period, see Gutman and his young assistant Wilmer the gunsel in "The Maltese Falcon.") Odets’ stage directions often refer to Eddie’s silky and surreptitious movements, and Johnson splendidly embodies these, giving Fuseli the smooth feral motions of a cat or snake. All the characters save the Bonapartes cringe before Fuseli (whose name, incidentally, is not Italian, but derives from the 18^th century Swiss painter of nightmares). In his most frightening moment, Johnson gives Fuseli an astonishing leap that combines fearsome aspects of a pouncing tiger or an uncoiling rattler.

Eddie Fuseli, however, shows only his gentler and even seductive side to the beautiful and fearless young Bonaparte. As Eddie insinuates himself more deeply into Joe’s life and boxing career, he showers the boy with gifts of rich and stylish clothing even while grimly intimidating Joe’s friends, family, and associates. Much of the play’s growing sense of doom comes from the realization that the fearless and feckless Joe will probably only escape Eddie’s tightening coils through some act of violence.

The play keeps the violence of the ring itself at one remove, like Greek tragedy’s catastrophes, allowing only narratives of grievous bodily harm and glimpses of bloody aftermaths. The multi-scene unitary set, designed by Kristianne Kurner and Tim Wallace, is provided with a small elevated scrim that turns transparent between scenes to show, inwardly illuminated by Nate Parde’s light design, inset vignettes of two gracefully sparring boxers – Sassan Saffari and Carlos Darze, who also double in other small roles.

Other performances include Greg Wittman as Joe’s wisecracking Jewish brother-in-law Siggie, and Amanda Dane as Siggie’s sultry wife Anna, known as The Dutchess. Pat Moran provides, in the philosophical grumblings of Mr. Bonaparte’s old friend Carp, needed moments of dark perspective, as he heaps scorn on all sports, even baseball, and mutters apt bleak tags from Schopenhauer. Ryan Hunter Lee and Ryan Lahetta complete the cast in short vivid roles. The characters’ late Depression era costumes are the good period designs of Mary Larson.

In a nice final touch, after the play’s last fatal lines are spoken, a tableau of the two embracing figures of Joe and Lorna appears on high in the illuminated inset where previously we had watched the balletic sparring partners. It’s like the ending of a myth, with the dead hero or the star-crossed lovers reappearing immortalized as demigods in a constellation amongst the stars, or like the concluding apotheosis scene of "Swan Lake" with Joe as the Prince and Lorna as Odets’ Odette. Sound designer Adam Lansky, who had provided us with appropriate little popular period music moments throughout the show – such as "I Found a Million Dollar Baby," "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," and a startling swing version of "Annie Laurie" – may have missed a good bet here by not finishing up playing Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet finale.

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE ONE HERE

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE TWO HERE

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE THREE HERE

DOWNLOAD PROGRAM PAGE FOUR HERE