The Emotional Impact of Boxing: An Interview with Playwright Marco Ramirez

Over email, playwright Marco Ramirez shared some thoughts about The Royale with Director of Artistic Development Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy: With its rhythmic and verbal approach to boxing, The Royale feels like a story intentionally built for the stage. Why did you choose to approach boxing in this expressive way? What does it give both performers and audiences?

Marco Ramirez: I love good fight choreo as much as the next person, but it's a funny thing, because even in the best case scenario, when it's done really well, I always feel like great stage combat can take the audience out of the play for a minute (wait... did that person actually get hit?) So from the start, I wanted to side-step it and write a boxing play that took boxing out of the equation. I wanted to remove the physical impact of the sport and focus on its emotional impact. To me, it gives the actors the opportunity to express what giving or receiving the hits felt like, without being burdened by trying to sell hits as the real thing. For the audience, my hope is that they can do the same, separating the violence itself from the emotional effort that goes into creating that violence.

BK: The Royale is an original play loosely inspired by the boxer Jack Johnson. What did writing a fictional story allow for that a more historical approach would not have?

MR: Freedom! It's a lot of responsibility, telling a "real life" story and trying to encapsulate a whole human life in 90-120 minutes onstage. So making this character a fictional creation allowed me to build my own version of a story without having to fit real incidents into the equation. 

BK: Boxing as a sport is nowhere near as popular as it once was during the mid or early-20th century. Even so, writers and audiences continue to embrace dramatizations of boxers on stage and screen. Why do you think boxing remains enduringly popular for storytelling?

MR: I think boxing is a great distillation of the western sense of storytelling. Two opponents enter, only one wins. To my mind, a draw or a tie in sports always feels unsatisfying. We like stories of dragons and dragon slayers, even if sometimes the dragon wins.

BK: What are some of your favorite writings on or dramatizations of boxing you'd recommend to anyone wanting to explore more?

MR: Joyce Carol Oates' On Boxing is a wonderful collection of essays on the sport. Jack London's A Piece of Steak. And Richard Matheson's Steel.