King James Sees LeBron's Career as a Muse for Male Friendships

Bromance is a tricky word.

It's got all the etymological makings to rival the sincerity of "soul friend" or affection of "besties," but is tied to slapstick buddy works like Step Brothers and Dumb and Dumber.

Rajiv Joseph's newest work, King James, running through Sunday, November 24, at GableStage, turns the term on its head with a touching survey of male friendship that balances candor and comedy through an unlikely lens — the career of basketball legend LeBron James.

The play chronicles the 12-year friendship of Clevelanders Matt and Shawn sparked by their shared love of James, who is a rookie playing for the Cavaliers when they first meet in 2004. When Shawn, a Black author celebrating the sale of his first short story, tries to buy season tickets from Matt, a white bartender with debts to pay, a haggle-off laced with "fake fan" accusations on both sides is started. By the end of their first conversation, they have an unspoken agreement to attend the games together, and an unlikely friendship is born.

The next three acts — or quarters, as the scoreboard above the stage reminds us — follow the ups and downs that mark any friendship. Shawn chases a screenwriting MFA in New York City for a stint and finds familial support in Matt's parents after his own parents suffer health problems. Matt opens the hot, new club his parents have always doubted him on and hooks up with virtually every girl in Cleveland. Each envies and revels in the other's successes and failures.

All the while, James' career wins and losses underscore the duo's. When the Ohio-born basketball player leaves the Cavs to play for the Miami Heat in 2010, questions of betrayal and legacy come up both on and off the court. When the prodigal player returns to Cleveland in 2014 and wins the team its first NBA championship, redemption is made possible in more ways than one.

Though the show's LeBron factor pays homage to the 305 and is a huge draw for sports fans, it's a welcome bait-and-switch for a topic often overlooked in theater — male loneliness. "Of course, it's not about basketball; that would be terrible. Just like every boxing movie or baseball movie is not really about boxing or baseball," shares director Ruben Carrazana, for whom King James is his directorial debut in Florida despite being a Miami native. "It explores how, for many men, sports is the only outlet in which they allow themselves to feel the full spectrum of human emotion."

He continues, "When you watch a big, meaningful game on TV, you see how the fans jump up and cry out of joy or fall to their knees and cry out of despair. It's not often that we see dozens, hundreds, thousands of grown men experience that fully and in public with one another."

Carrazana's election as director itself is telling of GableStage's attention to detail throughout the production. Aside from being an avid Joseph fan, Carrazana is based out of Chicago, where he saw the production during its first run at the Steppenwolf Theater in 2022. His familiarity with the play, its writer, and the 305 helped form a fresh Miami iteration that stood out from New York City and Los Angeles' productions.

Take the play's skillful use of projection art. In between each "quarter," a highlight reel of tabloid headlines, game highlights, and interview clips of James are splayed onto the set and soundtracked to hits like LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem," making for a subtle timestamp. Or its props and costuming, which artistically leverage a Motorola Razr and a painfully 2010s snapback-joggers combo more than I thought possible.

But these details hold no candle to the onstage chemistry between Matt and Shawn, played by Gregg Weiner, who's starred in 19 GableStage productions, and Melvin Huffnagle, who won a Silver Palm last season for his performance in the playhouse's How I Learned What I Learned. King James marks their first time working with each other, though you wouldn't gather that from their comprehensive performance capturing the stilted and lighthearted beginnings of a friendship to its emotional undoing.

"When I saw that this was a two-person show, that immediately piqued my interest. I know it's kind of a burden for actors, but there's a lot of meat to chew on in this script that's really appealing to me," says Huffnagle about what first drew him to the show.

The role was a seamless fit, considering he grew up just three hours away from Cleveland in Buffalo, New York, and frequently found himself navigating predominantly white spaces as a BIPOC person, much like Shawn.

"There's a white character and a black character onstage — there better be an address on race at some point," shares Weiner, who's on the social undercurrent beneath the play's basketball references and banter.

Carrazana, Huffnagle, and Weiner hold that while the show is not about race in and of itself, it is a theme that features in the larger story of these two friends, as the third-quarter climax reveals.

"The play is certainly not didactic. Rajiv Joseph has never been a playwright interested in hammering away at specific themes or messages," Carrazana says. "He's much more interested in presenting messiness, messy people, and it's up to the audience to decide for themselves what they want to make of it."

King James. Starring Melvin Huffnagle and Gregg Weiner. Directed by Ruben Carrazana. Through Sunday, November 24, at GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., #230, Coral Gables; 305-445-1119; gablestage.org. Tickets cost $40 to $75.