*

The producers of Lombardi, the new play about the Green Bay Packers football coaching legend Vince Lombardi, must wake up in the middle of the night sometimes wondering if it's possible to sell a sports-themed play on Broadway. The street, after all, hasn't historically been a haven for tales of the gridiron and the diamond, and "theatregoer" and "sports fan" are descriptors that are rarely shared by the same ticket-buyer.

In fact, Lombardi producer Fran Kirmser admitted that she and her colleagues would sometimes "look at each other and say, 'Oh, my God! How are these two — we call them sides of the orchestra — gonna come together? The sports side and the theatre side.'"

"It was the biggest selling play in the theatre's 25 years."

"It is the most successful play in our history in terms of box office and attendance."

The first comment was made by Michael Vigilant, the chief operating officer of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, which produced a play in 2009 called Bear Country, about famed University of Alabama football Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. The second came from Ted Pappas, artistic director of Pittsburgh Public Theater, which has produced The Chief, a play about famous Pittsburgh Steelers founding owner Arthur J. Rooney, Sr. seven times since 2003. The two productions are part of a recent, unexpected rash of regional plays that focus on towering sports figures. Others include librettist Buddy Farmer's musical Knute Rockne All-American, seen in the Chicago area, and When the Lights Come On, written by former college football player and coach Brian Letscher, for Michigan's Purple Rose Theatre Company.

The Chief is probably the oldest entry in this unlikely trend. The one-man show was co-authored by Rob Zellers, director of education at Pittsburgh Public, and Gene Collier, a sports writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The two men brought a draft to Pappas, who sent them back to the drawing board. With the second draft, though, Pappas took a leap of faith. "I took the risk," Pappas told Playbill.com. "I said, 'Let's produce it even though it needs work.'" Tom Atkins, who knew Rooney as a young man, was hired to play the title character.

	Tom Atkins as Arthur J. Rooney, Sr. in The Chief

"What I did not anticipate was that the play would develop into such a fine play," said Pappas. "But what I really didn't expect was the reaction of the audience. Both theatregoers as well as sports fanatics — and Pittsburgh fanatics — embraced the play. What it did is create a new audience for us. There were people who came who had never been to a play before."

Vigilant had a similar experience. He said about 50 percent of the audience for Bear Country had never been to ASF, located in Montgomery, before. A lot of these newbies were men, who came to the show wearing red, the color of the University of Alabama football team. "We were surprised to see RVs in the parking lot, where people were tailgating," recalled Vigilant.

"People who normally wouldn't go to a play will come see this," Farmer said of Knute Rockne, which played in Indiana in 2008. (Ironically, early versions of the work included Bryant and Lombardi as characters.)

Thomas Kail, the director of Lombardi, expects the Eric Simonson play to usher in a new Broadway audience. (Full disclosure: Lombardi was written by this reporter's brother.) "There's an opportunity here to have a lot of folks who aren't often invited to the dance on Broadway or Off-Broadway, or even regionally, to have a show that can speak to them," Kail said. "I would love to stand outside and see the traditional theatregoer standing alongside someone who's going to their first or second play."

Kail already saw that happen at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, MA, where Lombardi tried out in July. "There were definitely people who were wearing Brett Favre jerseys who had never seen a play before," he recalled. "It was a diverse audience. There were kids going with their parents. We had a performance where we had 90 kids from a sports camp, between 8 and 18 in age." He added, "Hopefully, there's a movement to be more inclusive in the theatre, and this is part of that wave."

Lombardi producer Kirmser, too, thought that the play "is an opportunity to bring new people into the theatre. We need new people coming to the theatre." She mentioned the support provided by the National Football League, a co-producer, as helping in that direction. "They are converting media outlets. For instance, we will have a billboard that's traditionally a sports billboard in Times Square dedicated to Lombardi for a couple of months."

An item of received wisdom in the theatre is that, when it comes to play selection, women have the purchasing power. In the case of these sports plays, however, while women are still the ones often buying the tickets, they were buying them with the idea that this might be a play their husbands or boyfriends would willingly go to.

"We know a lot of women were buying tickets for it," said Vigilant. "And we know that a lot of people purchased them as holiday gifts [for men]."