“At moments of greatest intensity it seems to contain so complete and so powerful an image of life—life’s beauty, vulnerability, despair, incalculable and often self-destructive courage—that boxing is life, and hardly a mere game.” —Joyce Carol Oates
Roy Williams is the son of Jamaican immigrants and grew up in London during the 1980s. He was inspired to write Sucker Punch when he realized how little today’s teens know about the violent clashes between minority youth and police throughout the ’80s. “Thatcher’s government had a huge influence on me and my friends growing up,” Williams says. “Not just her policies or the policing, but the spirit of the time—look out for number one—which discarded and dismissed people. That’s what I tried to capture in the play.”
Sucker Punch opens in 1981 in a rundown gym as the Brixton riots, Britain’s first anti-police riot, rage just streets away. Black teens Leon and Troy were caught breaking into the gym the week before, and they’re mopping floors, hoping Charlie, the gym’s owner, will take them on as fighters. Both young men are buffeted by the routine racism of Thatcher’s Britain—offhand comments and low expectations within the gym, and daily interactions outside the gym with a police force that had the right, and took the opportunity, to stop and search them seemingly without provocation. Troy and Leon are just getting footholds in the boxing world when the 1985 Broadwater Farm riots break out, bringing the tension between the friends—and their splintering paths towards assimilation or defiance—to a head.
As the play leaps year to year, Williams juxtaposes scenes in Charlie’s gym with monologues Leon gives from the ring. Plunging the audience into Leon’s head, Williams traces the young boxer’s struggle to understand and transcend the racial dynamics that define his world, balancing discipline and brutal physicality inside the ring and out.
Called “one for Britain’s finest dramatists” (The Guardian), this is Roy Williams’s first production in the United States. The Studio Theatre is proud to present this witty and explosive play, a play that looks to the past to ask contemporary questions about opportunity and equality; about race and sports; and about the courage it takes to find and define oneself.