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Brigid Bergen: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergen in for Alison Stewart. Coming up on tomorrow's show, we'll hear highlights of two of this year's most anticipated get-lit events with authors Rebecca Mackay and Mona Simpson. They were in conversation with Alison Stewart earlier this year at the New York Public Library, along with special musical guests, Hamilton Leithauser and Dora Williams. That's coming up tomorrow, but right now we're talking about a new off-Broadway show that tells the story of five high school seniors on the Lady Train Girls basketball team.

The show is called Flex set in the spring of 1997. The WNBA is about a month shy of turning a year old and young athletes now dream of the prospect of going pro, including Starra Jones, an ambitious 17-year-old point guard in a rural Arkansas town named Plano. However, she and her teammates must first figure out how to win at life off the court in order to make it to the state championship, to impress scouts with their skills on the court.

This includes setting aside petty rivalries, working together as a team, running plays instructed by their coach, apologizing and admitting when they're wrong, and supporting their teammate April Jenkins, who is deciding what to do about something that could halt her basketball career entirely. She's pregnant. A New York Times review states as this tip-off to a slam dunk New York debut makes clear that playwright Candrice Jones excels equally in sly [unintelligible 00:01:55] humor and in the swift tongue rhymes of teenage and athletic talk.

The play is titled Flex. It is running at Lincoln Center Theater now through August 20th. Joining me today is playwright Candrice Jones. Candrice, welcome to All Of It. Correct me if I'm saying your name wrong.

Candrice Jones: No, you're saying it correctly. It's Candrice. Thank you for having us.

Brigid Bergen: I'm also joined today with two of the actors in the play, Erica Matthews, who plays Starra Jones, and Brittany Bellizeare who stars as April Jenkins in the show. Erica, Brittany, welcome to All Of It. Great to have all of you here.

Erica Matthews: Thank you for having us.

Brittany Bellizeare: Thank you so much.

Brigid Bergen: Candrice, I want to start with a little bit of the origins of the play. I should note that you are also a former high school and college athlete, originally from Dermott, Arkansas.

Candrice Jones: Correct.

Brigid Bergen: There are a lot of elements of this play that feel like a classic coming-of-age story and maybe some connections to the play in your own background as an athlete, what was the primary catalyst for this narrative surrounding this team of young women?

Candrice Jones: Oh, wow. That's really a big question, but I would say that in my trajectory as a writer, I had always wanted to write about my high school/college basketball experience. I was a poet prior to being a playwright, and I had read some really beautiful poems about high school basketball or just about basketball in general, and none of them necessarily reflected my experience. It started with being a poet and wanting to write a poem about basketball.

The more I grew as a writer and stepped away from poetry, I decided that this would be a play. There was one image that stuck in my head from my former basketball experiences.

One of my college teammates was actually my high school rival, and while we were teammates in college, we would talk trash to one another about why our respective high school teams won or lost against one another every year. It was just like this ongoing, very friendly banter. One day we were on a bus headed to some game.

I can't recall, and she made the statement, Candrice, the reason why your team wasn't ever as successful as you guys should have been was because every year all your players got pregnant [laughs] or someone on your team got pregnant. My immediate response was, that's not true or I know it wasn't. Then I thought about it, I was like, "Actually, you are right. Yes." That was the narrative of my high school basketball team.

From that moment on, which happened in early 2000s, that image of these young women grappling with this thing that young women grapple with, sexuality and the chance of becoming pregnant, as well as wanting to play this sport that's traditionally associated with masculinity, basketball. I wanted to bring that to life on stage, and I wanted to bring my hometown Dermott, Arkansas to life on stage. Because to me, Dermott Arkansas is a basketball ecosystem. This play had to be representative of that.

Brigid Bergen: Why did you set it in the '90s?

Candrice Jones: Why in the '90s?

Brigid Bergen: Other than the amazing music that we got throughout the show?

Candrice Jones: Yes, because I was a high school student in the '90s and the year that the WNBA was inaugurated was in 1997, just like, is mentioned in the play. I felt that was a very special time. The announcement of the WNBA started all these conversations that I became very aware of about women who played basketball. These conversations extended beyond basketball. I recall an article and reading an editorial in which a woman stated, and I can't remember her name, but the women who were the first, groups of women inaugurated into the WNBA are drafted into the WNBA.

They were being asked if they were feminist or not. A lot of these women hadn't thought about that necessarily. They had been ballplayers and sisters and they have been achieving their dreams all their lives. I'm not sure they may have, I can't speak for them, but it seemed as though, the philosophies of feminism was not something that they thought about every day. Some of them did say that they didn't identify as feminists. There was this editorial that I read in which a person stated the women of the WA are feminists whether they want to be or not.

I was like even at the age of 17, I was like, "Whoa. That's interesting." If you think about Title IX and the push of Title IX, and the way women's basketball has come into being Title IX was it 1974, 1975, that it actually got signed? Then not long after that, there were several women's basketball leagues that came into fruition. The WNBA is the very first one that has had this much longevity. It's kind of handy. You have those histories that are aligned and also you have the freedom to choose to label yourself however you want to label yourself.

Brigid Bergen: Erica and Brittany, I want to bring you into this conversation. Your characters are teammates on this high school basketball team, the Lady Train. Where are these individuals in their lives when we meet them in the play? How are these women really thinking about their future? Brittany, maybe you can start us off.

Brittany Bellizeare: Okay. As you mentioned before, I play April Jenkins, and at the top of the story, April is grappling with being a couple of weeks pregnant and her now having to decide how she can convince essentially her basketball coach to let her continue playing. You see the teammates rallying for her in support of April to prove that a young girl who's pregnant can still continue to play basketball, something that she very much wants to do. She at that moment is at a crossroads of whether or not she wants to continue.

She definitely does, but how will she continue? You watch the play and figure out more of her pressures both outside of school and inside of school affect her trajectory and storyline.

Brigid Bergen: How about you Erica?

Erica Matthews: Yes. Starra she's there. There's with Brittany, I mean with April's character hoping to convince the coach, to let her play, because if April isn't playing, that means that they will not probably win the championship, which is everything to Starra because that leads to her going to D1 school, getting scouted, and then hopefully the WNBA in the future. In this moment, she is trying to make sure April is ready and that she's actually able to play so that her coach can see that as well when she walks in.

Brigid Bergen: Which aspects of the script really spoke to you as actors?

Brittany Bellizeare: I think what the aspect of a team and the connection that we have as high school friends but also as basketball players really spoke to me because it shows the commitment that young people have to their friendships and to their athleticism. I think we often think of teenagers not having that much to deal with, but in actuality, they do have a lot to deal with, not only schoolwork, but if they do play sports, they also have to go to practice. Whatever personal life experience they're having outside of school, is also a thing.

I think the beautiful thing that we get to watch these five women encounter is how they support each other and how they commit to what they're doing in every single moment of the scene that you're seeing them in.

Erica Matthews: For me, it would be like the love and the passion. I feel like each of these characters all have that in some way. Like Starra is this passion love for the game of basketball, and then we have a character, Cherise whose love for God and the love they have for each other and things like that. Sometimes even as teenagers, sometimes we think like we're just kids, and like Brittany was saying, we're just kids and this doesn't mean anything but as teenager, we have to understand that. It feels like the end of the world when we don't get what we want in that moment.

I remember being a teenager and not getting something small for me now, but it's like, at that time I felt like it was the end of the world. Those are some things that I enjoyed diving into in [unintelligible 00:12:00]

Brigid Bergen: Candrice, the backdrop of this place, is this town in rural Arkansas. What did you want to convey to audiences about what it's like to be a young woman growing up in the rural South?

Candrice Jones: One important thing that I don't think was very well articulated in 1997 and 1998 was the need to be seen, the need to be visible. I can say my teammates, my high school teammates, and I, we craved going to the Arkansas State Championship, not only to be seen by scouts but to be seen and validated by everyone. That we felt as though probably did not know that we existed. If you look at the map of Arkansas, Dermott Arkansas is at the bottom of the map, is this really tiny place.

The question is, do these other teams, do these other people, does the rest of the state even know that we exist? That is still a creative impulse for me when I write my plays that are set in rural Arkansas. It's the need for visibility. For me, the long stretch of that visibility is knowing that individuals who live in rural areas need access to the same healthcare, to the same educational opportunities, to the same upward mobility that individuals who live in larger areas have access to. That is still very important to me.

Brigid Bergen: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC, my guests are Candrice Jones, the playwright, Erica Matthews, and Brittany Bellizeare, actors in the new play Flex, which is at the Lincoln Center Theater through August 20th. We got a text that I want to share with you. The person wrote, "I definitely want to see this basketball play. It sounds terrific. As a high school and college player, myself as a lesbian, and as a New York Liberty season ticket holder, I'm curious if the influence of the LGBTQ community on girls and women's sports is addressed in the play."

That comes from Marie in Brooklyn. We haven't gone to that, but Candrice, do you want to take that question?

Candrice Jones: Sure, absolutely. I will say that the play happens in a microcosm, so it's not necessarily one of those documentary-style plays where you see the influence of movements that impacted these young women at this time is delivered in a very didactic way. More than anything, it's in the personal relationships so we do have a couple, Cherise and Donna, who are in the play and one is struggling with her love for her girlfriend Donna, as well as her religious principles. It's a story that we've seen and heard a thousand times.

She does come into direct conflict with her spirituality and her spiritual love for the person that she's with, and the other character, without giving away too much of the story, the other character Donna, she's more of a headstrong representation. She knows who she is and she knows that she wants to live her life freely and she's doing what she needs to do in order to make that happen. Yes, the LGBTQIA community is well represented in the play. It is definitely there.

I do think just I wrote that relationship into the play because again, I am inspired by my high school basketball experiences and the women on my team. However, it will be very difficult I think for me to write a play right now that doesn't address that, [chuckles] so yes.

Brigid Bergen: Erica, in the show, your character Starra develops this really strong rivalry with her teammate Sydney, who moved to Plano from Oakland, California. Why does Sydney bother Starra so much and what makes this rivalry between them so intense?

Erica Matthews: I think it goes back to wanting attention. Starra feels like in order for her to shine, in order for her to be considered the best, she has to get all the attention and so when Sydney arrives and she's just as good, or some may even say better than Starra, it takes away that. I think that with Sydney being there, taking away the shine, taking some the light away from her, it ultimately means it's taking away the shine, her attention from the scouts. From the scouts, from her teammates who she build this community with, and also, which will affect the WNBA. We keep going back to that.

Brigid Bergen: Sure.

Erica Matthews: She's becoming a hurdle and she's just another conflict into her getting what she wants.

Brigid Bergen: Erica and Brittany, all the actors on stage are playing basketball at one point or another throughout the play. Did either of you play basketball growing up?

Erica Matthews: Yes. [laughs]

Brigid Bergen: How long?

Brittany Bellizeare: I played basketball starting in seventh grade, and then I played all throughout high school and I went to a high school in a small town in New Jersey. I not only played on the high school basketball team, I also played in the league, the town league. I was often very busy during that time because I ran track as well. I was pretty athletic in high school. In college, I decided to go a different route. [laughs]

Erica Matthews: Oh, I played high school, never was good enough to make it to the league, like Brittany.

[laughter]

Erica Matthews: No, I played high school.

Brittany Bellizeare: High school, child league. [laughs]

Brigid Bergen: Candrice, you talked about how you played. What is it about this participation in a team and a team sport that you wanted people to understand that helped tell the story?

Candrice Jones: I think for high school students it is very much so, this is part of my identity. I belong to a group and therefore at least part of my identity is established. We know that high school it can be very cliquey. I lived in a small enough town. I don't feel like we had the separation of the popular kids and the not-popular kids. I always would joke and tell people at the time, this is the first time I've thought about this in so long, my high school is way too small for anyone to be popular.

[laughter]

Candrice Jones: Still in high school, no matter where you are, you identify with the group and part of your high school identity is always with that particular group. Yes, I'm sorry. I have forgotten the question. What was the original question?

Brigid Bergen: What I wanted to ask was what was it about team sports that you wanted to get through in this play, but we have about a minute left, so just short answer.

Candrice Jones: Okay. [inaudible 00:19:59] One thing I really wanted to highlight was how young women find out about their bodies in sports, whether it's individual sports or team sports. It's very interesting to me that, as a young woman, I knew so much about my body and the way that my body works because I played a sport. A lot of times, when we think about physical education or bodily education and kinesthetics, it's always tied to sex [chuckles]. How well do you know yourself so that--

I definitely know that young people need to be taught about their bodies and sexuality and all of that, but there is a duality that happens when you learn about your body through a sport as well as through your own personal intimacy as well.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to have to leave it there for now. My guests have been Candrice Jones, the playwright, and actress Erica Matthews and Brittany Bellizeare. They star in Flex, which is on stage through August 20th at the Lincoln Center Theater. It is so much fun. I saw it this week. Thank you all so much for joining me here on All Of It.

Candrice Jones: Okay. Thank you.

Brittany Bellizeare: Thank you.

Brigid Bergin: That's All Of It. All Of It is produced by Andrea Duncan-Mao, Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L. Malik Anderson, and Luke Green. Our intern is Aki Camargo. Megan Ryan is the head of live radio. Our engineers are Juliana Fonda and Jason Isaac. We had help this week from Bill O'Neal and Sheena [unintelligible 00:21:37]. Luscious Jackson does our music. I'm Brigid Bergin in for Alison Stewart, and we'll be back tomorrow with All Of It.

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