Three Seconds in the Key

Though based on the playwright’s real-life battle with Hodgkin’s disease, Deb Margolin’s Three Seconds in the Key is funny, fearless and fiercely unsentimental. A cancer-stricken woman and her child escape the stress of her illness by watching professional basketball on television, borrowing the bodies of these strong, healthy men to offset the tentative world of sickness they inhabit. When one of the New York Knicks walks out of the television and into the woman’s living room, the comical, dreamlike process of healing begins. By juxtaposing a disease-weakened woman with a powerful athlete, Margolin explores the body in all its beauty, danger and vulnerability; and by writing a dialogue between a Yiddish-speaking Jew and an African-American celebrity she also investigates important issues of race.

Presented by New Georges.