To Be in the Game: A Drama in Two Acts

To Be in the Game is an award-winning full-length drama depicting an African-American family struggling to maintain its cohesion and integrity during the intense and often unseemly process of college basketball recruiting. The central character, James Johnson, is torn between his duty to help his son Jamel, a gifted student and elite high school basketball player, choose the university which meets all his needs, and his own decades-long secret desire to become a college basketball coach. Under the intense pressure created by the competing forces in big-time college sports in America, James and his wife Ella find themselves transformed from loving and devoted parents to competing forces themselves, dredging long-buried anger and hurling bitter recriminations. Audiences have found To Be in the Game powerful, intelligent and compelling ("I couldn't wait for the intermission to end."), eye-opening ("I never knew this stuff went on."), psycholgically complex and morally ambiguous (“I wish we could stick around to talk about it. There are so many ideas here.") In the tradition of the classic dramas of Arthur Miller, playwright Tom Gotsill explores the ideas and contradictions imbedded in the American ethos. In the case of To Be in the Game, the moral compromises made by those who, unable to accept their own lives, seek “the big time”, the world glorified by the American dream machine.