Dancing in the End-Zone has been performed by: Elaine Stritch Matt Salinger Laurence Luckinbill Pat Carroll Lois Nettleton Alan Feinstein Don Fischer Scott Allyn Kathe Mazur Published by: Samuel French Agent: Buddy Thomas

Dramalogue Award

The few times I attended a high school football game, and during assemblies we were forced to attend, I vividly remember one of the cheers: “Blood – blood – blood makes the grass grow.” There was an unconscious acceptance of this recipe as the most seductive junior and senior cheerleaders committed to it with their voices and bodies. I also remember a player being led from the field by a priest – the young quarterback had been hit very hard and was blinded – the priest was assuring him it was temporary – but I saw panic in those eyes that suddenly couldn’t see.

At Marist, the college I attended, a Vietnam vet, who was a student there, had meetings with the college board of directors regularly where he urged the abolition of the football team. He saw it as a paradigm of war, which, he argued, should not be a part of an institution of higher learning. It sounded brave, bizarre and compelling.

The football team harassed him, but they were also afraid of him. He was very tall with massive hands and was reputed to know kung-fu. He also had eyes that had seen “the horror.” Needless to say, he failed in his quixotic mission, but it did provoke me to think about a cultural and national personality always primed for war. This odd young vet saw a relationship between the way we live and play and this country's historical legacy of war and its readiness for military intervention and solutions.

So Dancing in the End-Zone was born in college under the title "Celebrating the First Few Months" – then morphed to "Touchdowns" and then to its present title. The main character is a quarterback caught in the vortex of three powerful personalities: his adoptive mother, his coach and his tutor, a slightly older woman who shares the belief that the Vietnam vet held during my college days.

The protective myth that the psychologically fragile quarterback has lived by is - combat – as promoted by his mother and his coach. The action of the play, and his developing relationshp with his tutor, challenges that myth that he has accepted. At each turn with each person in his life he has to choose war or peace. He can't yet navigate middle ground – either fierce loyalty or rage at what he perceives to be betrayal.

It is a personal journey which examines the question of how war and aggression is born and nurtured in an individual psyche and how it expands to the pageant of violence that we live with and accept on a daily basis. It explores, as Brendan Gill put it, "the problem of discovering who we are when, almost from the cradle, our best intentions, in respect to giving love and receiving love, are thwarted. "

It’s a play, not unlike Avow, which needs three separate playing areas that interact with each other. It’s an external and internal landscape.

Dancing in the End-Zone was directed by Jose Ferrer at the State Theatre in Miami and by Melvin Bernhardt on Broadway. It was then produced in Los Angeles where the play received a Dramalogue award.

(revised text available)