The Super Steelers Bowl as epic civic theater

Though it's been a week since that stirring Super Bowl, it still feels like yesterday. Of course it's less than that since the final act of the drama, Tuesday's civic love-in, when we clasped our champions to our communal bosom.

 "Drama" I say, and theater it certainly was, a four-act epic that had all the heights of elation, precipitous reversals of fortune, depths of despair and sudden, golden victory that you'd enjoy in a robust melodrama, careening wildly from comedy to tragedy to delirium.

In my reckoning, the playoffs were preliminary. The two-week pre-Super Bowl trial-by-media was Act 1. Them the game itself was Acts 2 and 3, both of which ended with crucial Steelers reversals. Tuesday was Act 4. In between Acts 2 and 3 came a pause for orgiastic music, further whipping the audience into the necessary frenzy. Notice also how patriotic and militarist it all was, right up to having Gen. Petreus flip the coin.

The  whole was like nothing so much as the extended theater festivals of ancient Greece or the miracle and mystery plays of medieval England, also both civic rites with religious warrant, embracing the whole population in shared theatrical ritual.

(Talk about embracing the whole population: everybody in town got into the act, including the cast of "Metamor-phoses" at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, as this group portrait shows. Actually, the "Go Steelers!" is a photoshop addition to an earlier picture, but why not? In addition to jumping on the bandwagon of civic pride, they have the warrant of playing various gods and other figures from classical myth, fitting right in with my general theme.)

In Act 2 and 3, the game itself, there was clearly a demented, dramaturgical magician pulling the strings, especially with James Harrison's improbable 100-yard, sideline-skirting dash just before intermission (OK, halftime). More orthodox dramaturgy would have ended that act with a tightening of tension, not a sudden, goofy reversal. It looked as though Pittsburgh would end what had been a dominating first half behind or at best tied, and suddenly we were up 10 points, relaxing into our intermission drinks and snacks.

But the football gods, who've clearly studied dramaturgy with the best (Aristotle, Shakespeare and whoever else is giving classes in heaven these days), were just playing with us, relieving tension at the end of Act 2 so they could screw it to a higher pitch later on. They did a reverse version of that later in Act 3 with the holding penalty that caused a two-point safety. We hated that, of course. But without it, the Steelers might have made another first down or two before punting, in which case Larry Fitzgerald's second touchdown would have come too late to be overcome.

That's great plot management, using catastrophe as a springboard to triumph. As I say, some heavenly dramatist was playing with our emotions, raising them up and dashing them down only to raise them up again in an explosion of victory.

Dramaturgical analysis of SB XLIII can go farther. Consider the mythic, symbolic structure of football itself, which takes place in huge arenas that dominate our cities like the cathedrals or temples once did. There, on Sundays, no less, the population gathers in person and via radio and TV, in greater numbers than at all the other churches put together. In ecstatic unison they worship a band of specially selected and trained warriors, supervised by superior priests in striped garb, who attempt to move an egg-shaped object across a symbolic green battlefield until it crosses the final line or perhaps splits the uprights, causing an orgasm of celebration.

[Pause for acknowledgment: If this insight sounds familiar, you may already be a fan of Thomas Hornsby Ferrils' 1957 Harper's Magazine piece, "Freud on Football," which is available online: http://www.crystaloak.com/Gaijin/Essay/freud_football.htm.]

There are similar communal religious services on Saturdays, when younger warriors stage similar heroic rituals in hopes of moving up to the higher glories of Sunday. In these Saturday contests, the symbolic struggle is played out with the assistance of a band of agile, attractive young priestesses who cheer and gyrate, praising the delivery of the egg to its sought-for home. (The Steelers theology is purer -- they do without the priestesses.)

So as you can see, football isn't just play or even just theater, it's also myth and epic. And the actual game, the intense experience of shared peril and last-minute escape, was just the two-act centerpiece of the four-act participatory civic festival of communal confirmation, trial, rebirth and religious thanksgiving.

Then came Act 4, the ceremonial return of the champions to the bosom of the city that nurtured them. It's not enough that the hero slays the dragon or weds the beautiful heiress, he also has to share his triumph with the people. In the theater, classical comedy usually ends with a wedding and a festival in which the now-happy social group is reborn. For us, that was Tuesday's parade and celebration, with its easier, less anxious rhythm.

Even more than during the game itself, that was the day to be a Pittsburgher.