A Bout With Metaphors : Playwright Oliver Mayer delves into the macho world of the ring to explore attitudes about homosexuality.

Growing up a nice Jewish girl in a Baltimore suburb, I was vaguely aware of boxing as some sort of gladiatorial obscenity on the edge of organized sports--indeed, on the periphery of civilization. Later, in the early 1990s, working as an assistant on a yet-to-be-produced documentary on the life of Muhammad Ali, I became obsessed with the sport. Ali’s brilliant technique, his star quality, his ability to be both the hero and the clown entranced me as they did millions of other people. But something deeper than Ali’s charisma held me to the game, as I left the editing room and wandered into the more tawdry and less mythic world of live bouts.

My attraction to boxing confused me, so I read everything I could on the subject. Among the best I found was “On Boxing,” by Joyce Carol Oates. “I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing,” she wrote in her axiomatic way. “Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.”

Perhaps I was feeling a bit battered myself, but, for whatever reason, I disagreed: I found in boxing an endless series of metaphors, a blank screen on which I could project any struggle of existence. Other sports might express the give-and-take of daily victory and defeat, but only boxing is invested with profound symbolic stature. Boxing offers itself up as metaphor in a way few sports or human activities can, at least in part because boxing has clear, mortal implications: Each and every match is a literal life-and-death struggle. Boxing is, by far, our most dramatic sport.

Boxing is theater, and Oliver Mayer is the latest in a line of playwrights to make theater about boxing. Like Clifford Odets and Howard Sackler before him, Mayer uses the bare aggression of boxing, the clarity and inevitability of the battle, to examine broader issues about the time in which we live, issues about what defines a man and the price men pay for the rigid delineations of a macho culture. Mayer’s boxing play “Blade to the Heat” opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday.

Playwrights love boxing because it is such a perfect metaphor for “the hard world where success is made,” as Odets put it. The most moralistic of playwrights, Odets liked nothing better than a nice, raw metaphor for the brutal and corrupt life we lead. He immediately spotted the dramatic possibilities of the ring after film director Lewis Milestone dragged him to his first match (Odets was in Hollywood working on the movie “The General Died at Dawn”). In a biography of the playwright by Gabriel Miller, Milestone recalled that “during the prelims [Odets] paled and pulled out his notebook.” Milestone complained, reminding the playwright that the seats had been expensive, and Odets replied, “You have just given me a very fine play.”

Odets’ “Golden Boy” became a hit play, a film and then a Broadway musical (starring Sammy Davis Jr.). As other playwrights who used boxers for their protagonists found, Odets needed to show that his hero, Joe Bonaparte, was made of something finer than the brutality of the ring.

Joe’s brother Frank is a union organizer; his father is a poor but upstanding Italian immigrant. And Joe is, in fact, a frustrated violinist who is drawn to the glory of the ring because of a poor kid’s need to “be somebody.” In the high ideal world of the Group Theater that Odets personified in 1937, these are shorthand symbols (organizer, immigrant, artist) for the best things Americans can be.

The more Joe gets swallowed up in the corrupt and brutal world of the ring, the better a fighter he becomes. Joe’s progress in the ring is really the story of a man losing his soul. So too is the story of Jack Jefferson in Howard Sackler’s “The Great White Hope,” one of the most important American plays of the 1960s to examine the frightening racial divide of that decade. James Earl Jones won a Tony award for playing Jack Jefferson (a stand-in for Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champ), a great fighter who is hounded from the country by a white America that could not stand to have a black man in so significant and symbolic a role.

Sackler employed the blunt and colorful milieu of the ring to examine the civil rights conflicts exploding across the country along with the violent debates about the Vietnam War. And, in 1968, no one could miss the parallels between Jack Jefferson and Muhammad Ali, who, a year before, was stripped of his title for refusing to register for the draft.

In Sackler’s play, Jefferson is determined to be a great fighter and not a symbol for a racially torn America. He protests to a white reporter: “I ain’t fightin’ for no race, ain’t redeemin’ nobody! My Momma tole me Mr. Lincoln done that--ain’t that why you shot him?” But once Jackson wins the title from a fighter known as the Great White Hope, he is swept into the racial vortex of pre-World War I America nonetheless. As heavyweight champ, he cannot help but personify the possibility of dignity for the black community, just as he becomes an intolerable presence and a natural target for the racists who control the ring and government offices on both sides of the Atlantic. He cannot escape his times or the symbolic stature conferred by the ring.

In the mythic and turbulent days of the late ‘60s, when Ali shook off his “slave name” of Cassius Clay, the power of the ring continued to have metaphoric potency on the stage. Even Ali took to the Broadway stage in a short-lived musical called “Buck White” in 1969. By 1983, in somewhat subtler political times, the use of the boxing ring as a metaphor seemed like a quaint exercise in bygone jargon. Rod Serling’s “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” written for television in the 1950s, was produced posthumously on Broadway in an expanded version in 1985 and closed exactly two days later.

But Oliver Mayer is out to reclaim the ring as heroic dramatic territory. An earlier boxing play by Mayer, “Joe Louis Blues,” received mixed reviews when it opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1992. In 1994, “Blade to the Heat” caught the attention of George C. Wolfe, a great young director who succeeded Joseph Papp as head of the Public Theater in New York. Wolfe produced the play there, and he gave it a blistering, visceral production that duplicated how fights sound, look and smell to the participants.

The Taper is offering an entirely new production of “Blade to the Heat,” one whose merits are still to be seen. But one thing will be clear: Mayer uses the preternaturally macho world of the ring to explore attitudes about homosexuality, an issue now on the front lines of civil rights as politicians go into battle over “family values” and Americans take sides over what that means for the coming election.

In fact, Mayer uses homosexuality as Odets used music--that is, as a sign of his hero’s superior sensitivity. Like Joe Bonaparte, Mayer’s Pedro Quinn has a refinement that works against him in the ring. He says “excuse me” when he punches the reigning champ, a Cuban named Decima (that’s two letters from decimate--as in Odets, baldly metaphoric names are de rigueur). The villain--named Wilfred Vinal--is a third contender to the middleweight title who manipulates information about Pedro’s homosexuality to wedge himself into the competition.

Vinal’s charges of homosexuality make the ring an even more dangerous place. In fact, this is based on a real incident, when in 1962, Benny Paret called Emile Griffith a Spanish slang word for homosexual at a weigh-in. Paret incited Griffith so well that Griffith killed him in the ring.

Boxers value a rigid code of manliness above all else. In a world where bare bodies are luridly on display, and body-to-body contact is the very fiber of the game--the conscious acknowledgment of male sexual desire is simply not an option. By giving us a homosexual hero trying to operate in this exaggeratedly male clime, Mayer throws into vivid relief the social costs of coming out, and at the same time highlights the ingenious use of violence by people who find true intimacy impossible. This is perhaps what all boxing plays end up addressing: Boxing is not a metaphor for life so much as one for life’s failures--a reminder that beneath all of the rules lies the possibility of our own unregenerate cruelty.

In the hands of a good writer, the clarity of the ring is a perfect canvas to lay out such themes with a mythic tinge. With “Blade to the Heat,” Mayer shows a debt to Odets, but Odets and Sackler owe something to Mayer as well. Mayer is keeping a noble genre alive.

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“BLADE TO THE HEAT,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends May 5. Prices: $28-$35.50. Phone: (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000.