Witty, wise and oddly captivating, this two-actor play is a quiet stroke of genius
So often, before I sit down to review a performance, I come armed with context. I’ll scan a set list, if it’s a band. If it’s a story ballet, I’ll read the synopsis, acquaint myself with the arc. Preparation, in other words, feels like part of the job.
But for reasons not especially relevant here, I wandered into Pioneer Theatre Company’s King James almost entirely unbriefed.
It didn’t take long to realize what I’d signed up for. Flipping through the program, I discovered that the production consisted of two men in conversation—for the duration. No musical scaffolding, no elaborate scene changes, no theatrical sleight of hand to soften the edges. Just dialogue. Just language. Just two actors, tasked with holding a room.
That might sound like a limitation. It isn’t.
Rajiv Joseph’s King James—a Pulitzer finalist work that is as thoughtful as it is funny—uses the shared devotion of two Cleveland Cavaliers fans as its entry point into something deeper and more elusive: the mechanics of male friendship, and the peculiar ways men permit themselves intimacy. Sports, in this telling, are less subject than conduit—a socially sanctioned language through which Shawn and Matt can talk about everything else: love, disappointment, ambition, failure, the slow accumulation of life.
They are, on the surface, simply fans. They argue about trades, relive big moments, agonize over LeBron James’s departures and returns. But their fixation—at times comically obsessive—reveals something larger. Their emotional lives are routed through the Cavaliers’ fortunes, their personal timelines braided, almost imperceptibly, with LeBron’s.
Joseph structures the play accordingly, in four “quarters,” mirroring the arc of James’s career: the early euphoria of his arrival in Cleveland, the rupture of his move to Miami, the uneasy reconciliation of his return, and, finally, the catharsis of a championship.
What’s most striking is the play’s tonal balance. It engages weighty themes—race, class, loyalty—without ever announcing them too loudly. The intelligence of the writing lies partly in its restraint, its refusal to tip into self-importance. That sensibility is matched by Khiry Walker and Eli Mayer, whose performances feel lived-in and unforced, capturing both the humor and the ache embedded in Joseph’s script.
The production is staged in the Meldrum Theatre, an intimate, three-quarter-round space tucked inside the old Einar Nielsen Field House. It’s the kind of venue that collapses the distance between actor and audience; you don’t so much watch the play as find yourself folded into it. On the night I attended, the small house wasn’t nearly full—a surprising, and somewhat dispiriting, sight.
To be sure, King James isn’t for everyone. Pioneer Theatre Company has been upfront about the strong language, and for many traditional theatergoers in Utah, that alone will be enough to stay away. That’s not a moral failing, nor is it an argument that playwrights ought to sand down their work to accommodate local sensibilities. Still, sitting there, it was hard not to feel a twinge of regret.
Because what those audiences are missing is something increasingly rare: a play that trusts its language, its actors, and its audience enough to carry real weight. Utah audiences, as any full house will attest, have an appetite for theater—especially the variety deemed “family-friendly.” Yet there’s an irony in how often those productions, for all their accessibility, feel comparatively slight. King James, by contrast, offers something denser, truer—a reminder of what the form can do when it trusts its audience to lean in. It’s the kind of play that doesn’t announce its significance so much as accumulates it quietly over time.
One leaves wishing more people had been in the room to see it happen.
PTC’s King James is playing through April 4, 2026. Get tickets.
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