Review: RED PITCH at Olney Theatre

Red Pitch is a game-changer. One can tell from the play’s simultaneous use of a soccer consultant, dialect coach, fight choreographer, and on-site medic that it takes some serious practice and grit to bring this piece to life.  

The Olney Theater is hosting the American engagement of this award-winning West End debut play from British writer and director Tyrell Williams. The show follows Bilal, Joey, and Omz, Black British teenagers who dream of greatness against all odds. They met and forged their friendship on their South London housing project’s pavement soccer field, the titular “red pitch,” and are experiencing their first trials of adult life: family and friend drama, gentrification of their childhood neighborhood, and their first professional club soccer tryouts. They are challenged by each hurdle and grappling with the effort that it takes to remain a team while chasing their dreams in a changing world.

Sports and theater are often put at odds with each other, but the show is proof that they can coincide and emphasizes that there is just as much humanity, emotion, and stakes in both art forms. It’s not just about kicking a ball around; it’s about the excitement and envy the boys feel about club tryouts, the conflict from their own and others’ expectations, and the resilience it takes to achieve their dreams when it seems like the city outside of the pitch is out to get them. 

Red Pitch’s characters contain a complexity that is fading from contemporary scripts. Bilal, Joey, and Omz aren’t just friends; they’re brothers, in every sense scrappy and critical yet loving and supportive with each other. In short, they feel, and they feel hard. Local actors Ty’Ree Hope Davis (Bilal), Terrence Griffin (Joey), and Angelo Harrington II (Omz) flex every acting muscle and make it so easy to fall in love with their reckless, earnest physicality and poignant delivery, all while holding British accents and keeping track of a moving ball. Some of the dialogue suffers from the nervous habit of being repetitive to ensure the audience understands, but for the most part, it escapes the flatness of a play trying too hard to tell a story and not hard enough to make scenes. 

And the audience is so easily brought into these scenes. Seated in bleachers on both long sides of the rectangular pitch, designed by Nadir Bey, the audience spectates the solitary setting as a vignette into the most vulnerable and profound moments in the lives of the characters. The lighting by Amith Chandrashaker furthered the immersion: Colored stadium lights sent the players into daydreams of their professional careers, and a lone lamppost switched on at the end of scenes to call them back home. The costuming, established by Jeanette Christensen, was consistent and distinctive, displaying not only the intentions of the characters (Nike to practice or Gucci to party) but their economic disparities and how they share and provide for each other to level the Playing Field. The pitch successfully holds a whole world and enraptures the audience, and “the crowd goes wild” for it.   

Tyrell Williams’s Red Pitch scores in all categories, using the mediums of soccer and story for both a socioeconomic commentary and a coming-of-age comedy that is emotional and immersive. 

Performances run Wednesday-Saturday at 7:30 pm with 1:30 pm matinees on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.  

Runtime: 90 minutes