Rajiv Joseph is an American playwright and screenwriter known for his thought-provoking and emotionally charged works. Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1974, Joseph is a graduate of Cleveland Heights High, received his Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and his MFA from NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts. He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa. His play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama and he has twice won the Obie Award for Best New American Play.
Joseph’s 2022 play King James was originally drafted as a single scene. It was later turned into a four-“quarter” story — mirroring the four quarters of a basketball game with halftime between the second and third — following basketball great LeBron James’ career and two Cavaliers superfans over twelve years.
In a 2024 interview with San Fransisco public radio station KQED, James said “I realized I needed to have a play that spanned the length of time, because part of LeBron’s appeal and his legacy is his longevity, and part of the story is how the emotions towards him ebbed and flowed over time because of different fortunes.”
King James is inspired, in part, by his own adolescence, growing up in Cleveland Heights. He attended the same high school as the play’s character Matt, and spent his youth playing, watching, and arguing about basketball. He says “Team sports, especially of the kind associated with regions and cities, are about a great deal more than simply watching one’s favorite athletes in action. There’s so much of one’s identity, one’s upbringing, one’s family and friends that’s connected to the performance of a team… that sense of it, the sense of belonging somewhere. All those factors are kind of what inspired the play somewhere for me.”
Joseph found this sense of belonging as a Cavaliers fan, cheering for LeBron James even as he developed a now decades old friendship with Glenn Davis who was from Chicago and a Michael Jordan fan. Davis is now artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago and starred as Shawn in the Off-Broadway production of King James.
As any sports lover knows, passion for a team can lead to intense emotional reactions about games and players. When LeBron James left the Cavaliers to play with the Miami Heat in 2010, Cleveland fans were shocked, betrayed, and didn’t hesitate to vocalize their grievances.
Rajiv Joseph’s personal passion for the dramatic relationship between the city of Cleveland and LeBron played a large part in the development of his script. Joseph says about James’ career, “You know, he’s from the region, he came here, we loved him, he left Cleveland, we hated him, he came back to Cleveland, we loved him…”
King James also reflects current social dynamics in that its protagonists belong to different races and economic backgrounds, but, like so many American men, they use sports as a way to connect and to express otherwise repressed emotions. The play reflects that type of language and coded communication between its characters. “The story of King James is an American story, and a Cleveland story, and it deals with the racial dynamics between white and Black people in this country” it’s these aspects, Joseph says, that make King James a “decidedly American play.”
King James runs April 24 through May 18 at North Carolina Stage Company. Tickets and more information available at NCStage.org or by calling the Box Office at 828.239.0263
