Last Tuesday, Mer took me up to Cleveland, to Playhouse Square, for an Educators’ Evening. The Playhouse puts on these evenings for teachers, at which they give a presentation on the play, feed us, and let us see the play, and all for free. It is an amazing program, and I am thrilled that they go out of their way to treat teachers so well.

I was excited this evening because the play was Lombardi, a semi-fictional play about the famous Green Bay Packers head coach. I was looking forward to the talk about the show to see what the Playhouse drew out of the script or found challenging about the material. I was a bit surprised, and a little disappointed, when the presentation for the evening focused on grant applications and writing grants. It was a well-done presentation and was probably very helpful to many of the teachers there, but from my selfish perspective, I had been hoping for a more theater-specific focus. Still, they fed us, and the evening was all free, so all was well.

We did get to go to the public pre-show talk about Coach Lombardi and the show itself. The lecture was good, but was given by a very soft-spoken college student who had to put up with some flak from those in the back rows who could not hear her. She was a fun person who threw out small footballs when people answered her questions, and she gave us some background on Lombardi’s life and how he rose up through coaching ranks. He was also a family man, although he seems to have had quite a temper. The play explored those aspects of Lombardi through a fictional situation in which the playwright had a reporter live with the Lombardis for two weeks.

The play itself was excellent. Coach Lombardi was played by the same intense actor who had been the lead in the play Red that we saw last spring. It is a credit to the actor that he was able to play two very different roles, and that after just a few minutes I forgot all about the artist of Red and only saw Vince Lombardi. Lombardi’s wife was played by a tough but lovable actress who was fully believable as the woman who supported Lombardi from home. The cast was small – just the Lombardis, the young actor who played the reporter, and three actors playing football players.

The script did a nice job of weaving human interest throughout a play that also featured football. The players and the reporter had back-stories that slowly came out throughout the play. It was pretty fantastic for me – I love both theater and football, so this was a great evening of entertainment. Add in that it was a Tuesday and it felt as if we were “getting away” with something by going out on a school night, and it was a good time indeed.