The world premiere play “Billie Jean” depicts the enduring tennis participant Billie Jean King’s journey to grow to be a Grand Slam champion and a outstanding activist for ladies amid her private struggles.
So when its star, Chilina Kennedy, enters the third ground workplace at Chicago Shakespeare Theater dressed prepared for the court docket in a fluorescent orange tennis gown, it makes a press release.
Kennedy isn’t any stranger to biographical roles. She performed the titular function of Carole in “Lovely: The Carole King Musical” on Broadway, stacking up greater than 1,200 performances because the famed singer and songwriter.
Now, to embody one other King at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, the place the play runs by Aug. 10, she once more should rework. This time, she has a variety of intel: Kennedy frolicked with Billie Jean King herself for one more tennis play, and he or she’s put in in depth work to seize the sports activities icon and activist’s essence. As King, her mannerisms shift. She is extra animated, speaking along with her fingers. Her shoulders tense. She doesn’t transfer her prime lip whereas talking. All of those traits belong to King.
“So many individuals have such a deep relationship and a robust attachment to those folks,” stated Kennedy, who can be set to painting Canadian rock star Carole Pope of Tough Commerce in an upcoming musical. “They’re so well-known. Folks know their voices, their kinds — like, everybody is aware of Billie Jean’s mannerisms and her fashion of taking part in tennis. So, there’s a variety of stress that goes with taking part in a job like this.”
The largest tip Kennedy acquired in preparation for this function was from Billie Jean herself. Throughout rehearsals in 2023 for the tennis drama “Love All” at La Jolla Playhouse in California, King gave the actor a number of tips about taking part in tennis. There, Kennedy additionally began finding out her demeanor and actions.
“You need it to move by you organically,” Kennedy defined. “However there’s a sure form of speech sample that she has. There’s a sure form of approach that she walks, a approach that she strikes by the world.”
By the method, Kennedy additionally grew to become a tennis fan. She purchased a ticket to the 2023 U.S. Open. When she advised King, the tennis legend invited her to her non-public suite. “I sat in Billie Jean King’s field and watched Coco [Gauff] win and watched [Novak] Djokovic win,” Kennedy stated. “I used to be there till 2:30 within the morning, and it was top-of-the-line experiences ever.”
Director Marc Bruni, who additionally helmed “Lovely” and “Love All,” stated Kennedy was the primary one who got here to thoughts for the lead.
“She has an emotional accessibility that enables for the viewers to have the ability to be in her coronary heart and really feel the highs and the lows,” he stated. “She additionally has a outstanding likeness to Billie Jean. It’s unbelievably shut whenever you see her within the wig and the glasses.”
For this manufacturing, the game isn’t offered in a literal approach. There are matches within the present, however there aren’t any balls nor tennis racquets. Playwright Lauren Gunderson — one of the produced writers in America, whose work consists of the Shakespeare-era comedy “The Guide of Will” — stated she deliberately wrote this script with out specializing in staging the precise recreation. “We actually wished the artwork to steer,” she stated.
That offered a problem for the director, however “we discovered a vocabulary for it,” Bruni stated. He labored with motion director Steph Paul to craft a approach of displaying tennis matches, by victories and defeat, utilizing bodily motions. “We’re not staging whole matches, as a result of that’s form of the least fascinating ingredient dramatically. It’s actually about what occurs off the court docket. That’s the thrust of the drama.”
“We’re not making an attempt to make it seem like tennis. You’ll be able to go watch Wimbledon if you wish to see tennis,” stated Gunderson. “For our present, it’s the artwork of this sport and the way it expresses emotionality.”
The set seems like a tennis court docket, however the present covers much more than the game. An activist well-known for her stances on girls’s rights and pay fairness for ladies’s sports activities, King championed Title IX, the federal civil rights legislation that prohibits sex-based discrimination. This play covers her activism but in addition her setbacks: She was outed as a lesbian in a lawsuit filed by a former lover, which in the end price King hundreds of thousands.
“When you get invested in what she’s preventing for, there’s humor and there’s a lot wit,” Kennedy stated of her character. “It’s thrilling. And it’s inspiring. Although there are a number of laborious issues, you get by it with grit and willpower and with a variety of pleasure.”
Mike Davis is a theater reporter who covers phases throughout Chicago.
