‘Twixt hoops and the Bard, few words suffice

For the AJC

Corporate litigation is a rather good substitute for the competition I experienced in college athletics. You have to keep your focus all the time, and there is a lot of pressure associated with both. In my firm, there are attorneys who played college basketball, tennis, golf, baseball and nearly any sport you can name. I think that there is something to the competitive nature of athletics that lends itself to being a successful practitioner of law.

Basketball has given a lot to me. I don’t know that I would have gone to as fine an institution for college or law school (also Vanderbilt) without doors opening to me because of my ability to play basketball. I want to stay involved, and it’s important to give back to a game that has provided me with so much. That’s why I enjoy working with the Atlanta Tipoff Club.

I originally became involved with Georgia Shakespeare for geographic reasons more than anything. My family -- my wife and two daughters, currently aged 7 and 6 -- lived right behind Oglethorpe University for several years, and my wife and I began attending the productions in the late '90s.  I joined the board in late 2002. King & Spalding has had a very strong relationship with Georgia Shakespeare for the organization’s entire 25-year history, and I’m looking forward to the Bard’s Bash, our 25th anniversary fund-raising gala on May 22.

My college major was communication studies, and I’ve always liked theatre and the arts. I have a tremendous amount of admiration for individuals getting on stage and delivering great performances every night. Unlike in a basketball game, there’s no timeout if you mess up. You have to nail it every night, every time.

If I had to pick a favorite play that Georgia Shakespeare has produced, it would probably be the fall production of “Taming of the Shrew” from a few years ago. It was hilarious. Ironically, that’s the lead play this year in a musical format: It opens June 11 as “Shrew: The Musical,” and I am very much looking forward to it.

That being said, it’s really hard to pick just one as a favorite, because they are all very good, even when they’ve gone outside the Shakespeare canon. For example, “Metamorphoses” from 2007 was just terrific. That was my favorite non-Shakespearean production. Regardless of the play, it’s fun to picnic outside the theater and then go inside and be entertained for a couple of hours.

Shakespeare is like the Bible, beautifully written. The company often adapts the plays to other eras, such as “Julius Caesar” in the Huey Long era in Louisiana. That speaks to the universality of Shakespeare’s themes and language. It’s also interesting to see or hear a turn of phrase in Shakespeare that is in our common vernacular today, whether it’s “to be or not to be” or “all the world’s a stage” or any of the dozens of others.

I like both comedy and tragedy in the plays, and [artistic director] Richard Garner strives for balance. This season will balance “King Lear,” one of the great tragedies, with “Shrew” and “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” both comedies. In Shakespeare, there’s something for everyone.

I think that there are parallels between athletics and Shakespeare. One of the things that makes sports so exciting its unpredictability. Sports and Shakespeare are about expecting the unexpected. We all know how “Hamlet” or “Romeo and Juliet” ends, but there was always a first time when you didn’t know what was going to happen. And even when you know how the play ends, the journey that takes you there can be different depending on how the play is adapted, who the actors are and how they interpret the characters and dialogue, and many other factors. Shakespeare sequenced and wrote these plays so they were not entirely predictable, and that was a good thing.

--As told to Michelle Hiskey for the AJC