The great thing about basketball is that it’s simple. You win or you lose. There isn’t really much in between. Art, on the other hand, is much more complex with a great deal more ambiguity. Which is why Small Ball, the musical commissioned and produced by Rockets GM Daryl Morey, is hard to define. Yes, it’s about basketball, but only in the sense that it involves a basketball player, a team, a coach and a press conference—a maniacal, days-long press conference on a beach, but still.
Produced by Catastrophic Theatre and directed by long-time Houston sports fan Jason Nodler and his artistic partner Tamarie Cooper (she also has one of the more envious parts in the musical as a reporter sitting literally in the center of the audience lobbing questions at the cast on stage), Small Ball follows Michael Jordan—an MJ, not the MJ—as he pursues his fading dream of playing semi-professional basketball on the island of Lilliput, the mythical land of tiny people from Gulliver’s Travels.