Requiem for a Heavyweight

RISE AND SHINER Sullivan gets some comfort from Stevens.

Photo: Janna Giacoppo

Harlan “Mountain” McClintock, almost heavyweight champion of the world, has been told by the doctor that his career is over—one or two more punches to the eye could blind him or worse. Maish, McClintock’s shady manager of 14 years, is in debt from a lost bet against his own “boy” and in search of a new one to ride; he wants to steer McClintock into degrading work in professional wrestling. McClintock, meanwhile, is simply lost; at 33 years old with a 9th-grade education and nothing on his résumé save the fact that he was ranked number-five in 1948, his whole identity is at stake.

Serling’s play reads like the sort of melodrama you’d see on the tube in the golden age of television, and that’s exactly what it is—Requiem originated on CBS’s Playhouse 90 in 1956, and became an iconic film in 1962. It’s largely because Requiem has been so influential that it now feels so clichéd; Serling’s story became an archetype. Still, plays in which lead characters actually say things like “I don’t know anything but fighting” are hard to pull off credibly today.

This stage version, too, expanded from the teleplay, might be more satisfying at its original length; points are made so many times that they lose their punch. But Contey’s strong production downplays the script’s weaknesses. Fine performances from the cast, particularly from Sullivan as the almost-was boxer struggling to understand what’s happened to him, cover Serling’s chinks. A thoroughly convincing boxing match at the start (credit to fight designer Nick Sandys) announces the quality of the production we’re in for, and a sequence with Sullivan and prizefighter portraits is terrifically evocative of a classic film montage. But that’s just it: When a film adaptation makes us think of film, we start to wonder why it’s on stage at all.