The King James version

Rajiv Joseph's brilliant play makes you dance, laugh and think.

Rajiv Joseph's "King James," playing at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown LA, starts like a ballgame.

Khloe Janel is the DJ, visible in a doorway next to the stage, and she keeps the tunes going just like an NBA warmup. On Wednesday night, graying patrons of the arts couldnt resist dancing, at their seats or in the aisles. At the time you're thinking this will be a celebration of LeBron James' Cleveland days, parts one and two, and what's wrong with that? Nothing like a little iconography to ease the frazzled mind.

Instead, James himself turns out to be little more than wallpaper, and the story is far twistier than it appears.

Matt (Chris Perfetti), a skinny neurotic who struggles to run a wine bar, has grown up watching the Cavaliers through thin and thinner. Shawn (Glenn Davis), who nurtures vague dreams of writing success, knows the historical significance of James' rookie season of 2004 and answers Matt's plea to buy tickets.. The two have trouble agreeing on how much they're worth, so Matt undercuts himself, to pay off debts, but invites himself to become Shawn's Gund Arena guest. Together they will watch the Akron Mozart, a guy who Matt proclaims is "already better than Jordan" as a teenager, and a uneasy brotherhood sprouts.

Those were the good old days, as it turns out. Shawn nearly reaches a jersey-burning fury when James bolts Cleveland for Miami. Matt, a curmudgeon with a flip phone who can find daily examples of "what's wrong with America," says he can understand James' ambition. Either way, they hold onto to the tickets, which themselves are works of art, symbols of the soul. Cleveland had gone a half-century without a champion, actually celebrated an 0-16 NFL season with a parade. At some point you accept the games on their terms. Insisting on winning is almost unseemly.

Matt is moving up in business. Shawn is making inroads with his writing. He moves to New York for schooling, then to L.A. to work on a TV series that, hilariously, depicts the LAPD's "Buddhist division." When LeBron decides to return to Cleveland after two titles and four consecutive finals in Miami, he sends Shawn over the moon. But Matt is suspicious. He trips across the line when he blurts that James "doesn't know his place," and Shawn's umbrage demands that Matt clarify himself. Reflexively, Matt strikes back. Has Shawn, the TV writer, forgotten his "place"? Matt certainly won't let his friend forget that he financed most of Shawn's adventure.

In the end Shawn has enough success to run into Hollywood's unspoken barriers, and Matt is back to rubbing nickels together, selling the contents of his parents' novelty shop that include a dearly departed stuffed armadillo. It's the day after the Cavaliers' ultimate triumph, a comeback from 1-3 and a Game 7 Finals win at Golden State that Shawn, as a member of the nouveau riche, actually witnessed. Embittered by failed romance and the threat of destitution, Matt pretends he either ignored the game or rooted for the Warriors, but neither guy believes that. It ends with an ebullient showdown, as Shawn tries to drag Matt to the once-in-a-lifetime parade.

First of all, this is fun: Snap-crackling dialogue, sudden mood swings, great physical comedy (Davis brilliantly captures the King's mannerisms), and a friendship tight enough to bring out tough truth. Matt ticks off the girls who have dumped him, including "Katie" and "Katie Two," and says the latter was the most special, the one he should marry, "You just called her Katie Two," Shawn reminds him. As the play ends, Matt wants to hang around the shop to fend off a breakup call from Kim, the latest.

But playwright Joseph is asking pointedly about fandom, and the transferral of life stories. Shawn laments the way LeBron, and athletes generally, toy with your soul, as if the fan has no defense mechanisms. It's a fantasy world that somehow lives and breathes inside your own world, no longer a means to an escape. Shawn is willing to buy into all that -- he says his biggest problem with L.A. is "all those Lakers fans" -- but Matt wants to bubble-wrap those emotions, at least for a while. The dad who took him to all those Cavs games really had little use for him otherwise, so how can he surrender to something so ephemeral? The hook, of course, is that he always does.

Davis is an artistic director at Chicago's legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Perfetti, among other things, appears on ABC's Abbott Elementary. Actors are magic, but there is a deep investment in a 2-man play, and Davis and Perfetti bow deeply at the end, with adulation and exhaustion, gallantly earned.

"King James" runs at The Taper through July 3. Catch it whenever you can, with shoes made for dancing when everybody's watching.