‘Billie Jean’ at Chicago Shakes

The last two words of the play Billie Jean were difficult to hear during a recent performance at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. They made a double entendre that really tied the room together, but the audience started cheering like mad before the actor could say them. This was the thrilling end of a drama written by Lauren Gunderson. You should see it. 

Billie Jean is a story about Billie Jean King, an athlete who was forced to deal with chauvinism, dishonesty and prejudice because she wanted to play tennis for a living. By defeating them all, she became a champion of history. 

I attended the play with my girlfriend, who is a screenwriter and an advocate of smashing the patriarchy. A week before the show, our neighbor told us how awesome it was when Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in a 1973 match known as The Battle of the Sexes. Our neighbor is a college professor and also an advocate of smashing the patriarchy. She said that Bobby Riggs was awful towards Billie Jean King. 

I got a kick out of Bobby Riggs when I was young. He was a goofy loudmouth former Wimbledon champ who kind of looked like Austin Powers. He challenged Billie Jean King to a match and lost. How could anyone not like that?

Billie Jean King was betrayed by people she loved, marginalized by the status quo and grossly underpaid when she emerged as one of the world’s best players in the early stages of her career. Billie Jean the play brings these challenges to life through a cast that emanates passion and humor without making it weird. 

The actors also document her athletic achievements. They do a play-by-play while smacking imaginary tennis balls with imaginary rackets on a center stage court. An overhead scoreboard keeps score like a real tennis match — 30-love, advantage-King, and so on. There are also frequent “live” interviews with a video monitor and everything.  

The audience seemed to love every minute. This was a friends-and-family type of thing, so there were plenty of artists, patrons and supporters among them. It started as a pre-show gathering in the Shakespeare Theater’s Courtyard lobby, an upscale chamber with couches and café tables. 

When we arrived, our first priority was to get some food. My pile of discarded beef and chicken skewers swelled until I felt like a glutton. Then I bumped into a guy who had even more, so I went back for shrimp and topped it off with an Amaretto sandwich cookie. 

Next to the buffet was a microphone where a handful of important people welcomed the guests. One them was Artistic Director Edward Hall, who said that the Shakespeare Theater offered the greatest rehearsal space in the country. Behind him was a row of windows framing a view of Lake Michigan.

Another was the playwright herself, Lauren Gunderson. Wearing a fuchsia dress and fuchsia sneaks with a fuchsia streak in her hair, she fit right in with the artsy twenty-somethings who seemed delighted to be there. She was keeping her remarks brief, she said, because we were about to hear two hours of her ideas. 

One of her ideas must have been to show how cool Billie Jean King actually is. The younger Billie Jean, played by Julia Antonelli, is spunky and hilarious. The adult one, played by Chilina Kennedy, is someone you’d love to sit next to in a bar. Down-to-earth, fearless and self-aware, she combines a great sense of humor with a Lebowski-esque aura (and I’m talking about The Dude here). 

This made it all the more entertaining to watch the character turn problems into solutions. Did you know that Billie Jean King helped create the Women’s Tennis Association with the support of a cigarette brand? Her other supporters included Elton John and Larry King, to whom she appeared to be happily married for nearly twenty years. Both factor into the story to varying degrees. As do the San Francisco Giants, who get a shout-out in a scene that brought a tear to my eye. 

By the end of the performance, everyone supported Billie Jean King. And we were going to show it. Seriously. It wasn’t one of those reluctant standing ovations where one person gets up and the rest of the audience hopes they’ll just sit down already. Everyone got on their feet as soon as the play ended. Or, as mentioned earlier, as soon as they thought the play had ended. 

During the after party, my girlfriend and I sidled up to Lauren Gundersun at the buffet and hijacked a few minutes of her time. I mentioned the thing about the final line getting drowned out by all the applause. With a Billie-Jean-King level of coolness, she said that’s a good problem to have.