OnStage: Play probes plight of student athlete

'I have to choose my words very carefully," said Lou Bellamy, Penumbra Theatre artistic director, as he began to discuss the experiences of Lou Bellamy, University of Minnesota theater professor. The academic Bellamy is quite familiar with the topic that director Bellamy is staging as Penumbra opens its season in St. Paul.

"Redshirts" (the title refers to the practice of keeping a player out of varsity competition for a year to extend his or her college career) concerns a group of student athletes at a major university who are accused of plagiarism. Beyond that dramatic hook, though, the work by playwright Dana Yeaton explores the minefield that athletes, coaches and professors tiptoe through every year as they juggle academics and high-stakes college sports.

Bellamy has seen hundreds of real-life examples over some 30 years of teaching at the university -- student athletes who navigate the system with varying degrees of success and failure. He's been caught between the rock and the hard place of balancing academic necessities and flunking a student, which can end their athletic career and, ironically, dash whatever hopes they might have had for more education.

"The stakes are way too high," said Bellamy, "as universities are being used as training camps for the professional leagues. We have a ways to go on this."

Bellamy heard about "Redshirts" through Blake Robison, artistic director of Round House Theatre of Bethesda, Md. Round House is coproducing the show, and this production will travel to Bethesda. Previously, Robison headed the theater department at the University of Tennessee and invited playwright Yeaton to come down in 2004, several years after an academic scandal at the Southeastern Conference school.

"My motives were not to do an expose about the obvious thing -- that there's academic fraud in college football," said Yeaton. "I wanted to write a play about people we think we know, but that goes several layers down, like the stereotypical dumb football player who we later see is smart and self-aware."

In Yeaton's play, four running backs for fictional Tennessee Southern University struggle through a poetry class and end up being accused of plagiarism when similarities appear in essays they each wrote. The backfield coach intervenes with the English professor. Throughout the piece, a tutor figures prominently with the athletes.

If all this sounds familiar, local audiences certainly would find resonance with the academic tutoring fraud at the University of Minnesota that forced the resignation of basketball coach Clem Haskins and four top officials in the athletics department in 1999. Jan Gangelhoff, an administrator in academic counseling, was the leading figure in a scandal in which she and others completed assignments and wrote papers for athletes.

In another example of what can happen when student athletes get caught on the horns of academia, Gary Russell was dropped from the university football team in 2005 and eventually flunked out of school. He's put all his chips on a run at professional football with the Pittsburgh Steelers. If Russell is able to leap the hurdle and cash in on the NFL, he becomes an example for athletes struggling in class and wondering if academics are worth the trouble.

"You know the Greeks talked about developing mind and body," Bellamy said. "That's been thrown out of whack. These young men and women are put on a different track."

The racial element

As Bellamy ran his actors through rehearsal recently, the most striking revelation seemed the evenhandedness of Yeaton's characters.

"The best arguments are the ones in which both sides are right," said Yeaton. "I have so many cards to play without anyone being a villain."

Bellamy has cast a mix of newcomers and Penumbra veterans. James Craven plays the running backs' coach; Ahanti Young (last seen in "Zooman") is one of the students accused of cheating, and Regina Marie Williams plays the English professor intent on academic justice. James Alfred, whom Bellamy directed in a production of "Jitney" in Kansas City, Mo., plays the lead role -- a self-assured (delusional?) freshman running back. Two other actors have Round House roots.

Because of the prevalence of black college football players, the play takes on issues that are heavily influenced by race, Yeaton said. That presented a challenge for the playwright, who is white and teaches at Middlebury College, an elite private school in a small Vermont town. He's unapologetic, though, about pretending to speak for his black characters. In his Tennessee sojourn, he worked as a tutor in the athletic department and developed both a writing program and a play with 23 freshmen athletes.

"They spoke, I typed their words and edited them, and then they performed," Yeaton said. "I felt that I know these voices and predicaments and personality types. I have the real- life people to base these characters on. I didn't pull their dialogue from film or TV."

If he needed more backup, he has Bellamy's filter for realism.

"He brings a perspective that I can only benefit from," Yeaton said. "Lou is no stranger to athletics and teaching athletes."

Graydon Royce • 612-673-7299

Graydon Royce • groyce@startribune.com