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The battle between tennis and it’s smaller, louder cousin pickleball has reached the theater.
Bimbo Tennis: The Play will take over the tennis courts at Colonel Summers Park this weekend and next. The audience will sit courtside for the two-act comedy, which is coming off a sold-out premiere run in Santa Monica, Calif. It’s a dramatization of tennis vs. pickleball with a cast of seven local actors.
“This is a battle we’re seeing across the country,” says playwright Emma Gardner. “Let’s laugh about it and talk about it.”
Bimbo Tennis is an adaptation of, of all things, Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play The Cherry Orchard. (Gardner also gives a hat-tip to Arthur Kopit’s The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis from 1965.) It follows the Ludmila Bimbova family as they find their beloved family tennis court—the last one on earth—threatened by Andreessen Marcus, a tech bro who wants to convert it into four pickleball courts for his factory workers.
“It’s class and capitalism vs. socialism as seen through the lens of pickleball vs. tennis,” says Gardner.
Bimbo Tennis is named after the real-life tennis clinic Gardner hosts in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, at which she and her “cadre of bimbos” (aka friends) play on Wednesday mornings.
Her friend and producer Tyler Pell, the editor in chief of the publication Portland Tennis Courterly, played a role in getting the production to come to Portland. One staged reading at the Mount Tabor Open and a Regional Arts & Culture Council grant later, Bimbo Tennis is getting it’s seven-night run in Portland. (It was originally planned as an eight-night run, but the Aug. 6 performance has been cancelled due to the wildfire smoke.)
Each performance begins with a pre-show tennis exhibition and clinic. The courts at Colonel Summers Park are in “huge, huge disrepair,” Gardner says. The nets are held together with a lot of tape and string, and the cracks in the court can send balls bouncing in unexpected directions. But despite not being the most beautiful, they have a lot of character and the park is full of life.
There’s a dramatic perk to the rough courts, though. “It heightens the irony of wanting to save the court when it’s an objectively dilapidated court,” Gardner says.
GO: Bimbo Tennis at Colonel Summers Park, Southeast 17th Ave. and Taylor St. eventbrite.com/e/bimbo-tennis-the-play-tickets-1993496691267?aff=oddtdtcreator. 6:30 pm exhibition, 7:30 pm show, Aug. 7-9 and 13-16. $15-30.
