10 September 25 - OctOber 1, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Laughing Through the Pain Inside The Trade, a new play hoping to heal the city’s Luka Doncic heartbreak. BY SIMON PRUITT W hen Matt Coleman went to sleep on Feb. 1, Luka Doncic was still on the Dallas Maver- icks. He woke up to a text from his friend Matt Lyle, plainly reading “What the fuck.” “I immediately knew it was something to do with the Mavs,” Coleman says. “Matt and I text about a select number of things, and ‘what the fuck’ would only apply to like, one of those things.” A quick internet search confirmed his un- imaginable fears had become true: point guard Luka Doncic had been traded to the Los Ange- les Lakers for Anthony Davis. Coleman and Lyle (or “the two Matts”) were devastated. Both grew up in East Texas — out of broadcast range for Mavericks games — and met in col- lege, where they bonded over their shared place in the Venn diagram of basketball fans and fiction lovers. Lyle has been a playwright for more than 20 years, and Coleman has au- thored several detective fiction books. “Our early friendship sort of paralleled with Dirk’s [Nowitzki’s] career,” Coleman says. The German phenom was drafted by the Mavericks in 1998, remaining with the team for two decades until his retirement in 2019. By the time Doncic was drafted to the team in 2017, aligning with the final year of Nowitzki’s career, it was as if they could be young again. “It was almost like Luka was Dirk’s ava- tar,” Lyle says. “Like his son. Like he gave us his only begotten son to continue his legacy.” “We felt this pride,” Coleman adds. “Like it was our kid.” Naturally, when news broke about Doncic’s trade, those long-held feelings came with it. “I was pretty devastated,” Lyle says. “I know in the grand scheme of things, this is not the most important thing happening in the world or even my life, but why does it feel like this? Like a death or an ended relationship.” Their sentiments were shared across the city, resulting in honorary murals painted for Doncic and an in-person protest in downtown Dallas before the team’s first home game after the trade. Just a few years prior, Coleman and Lyle co-wrote Raptured!, a “sex farce set in an East Texas baptist church” that debuted at Theatre Three in 2019. “It went really well and we had a lot of fun,” Coleman says. “We talked immediately about doing this again with something. And then God stopped loving us, and we had to make sense of the world.” Lyle’s gears began to turn. Could the high drama of the Doncic trade translate to an en- tire stage play? What if it were written through the framework of a centuries-old theatre technique? “It’s a tragedy,” Lyle says. “But it’s a par- ody of a Greek tragedy, sort of making fun of how big a deal basketball is and these mil- lionaires [are] going off, having an awesome life. We feel attached to it in some way, like emotional about it.” Lyle pitched his The Trade to Jeffrey Schmidt and Christie Vela, artistic directors at Theatre Three in uptown Dallas. They liked it enough to clear out room on their schedule for the show to run in October, coin- ciding with the beginning of the NBA season. Soon, Lyle and Coleman got to writing, fin- ishing and casting the production ahead of a tight Oct. 13 deadline. After completing the script and stage design, Lyle began the first day of official rehearsals at Theatre Three on Sept. 16, a speedy turnaround. Playing Sixth Man A t around 7 p.m. at the theater, six actors file into the 280-seat auditorium for the first full cast read-through of The Trade. We first notice Chad Cline, a middle- aged man dressed in a full Mavericks uni- form adorned with Doncic’s no. 77. If you’re four drinks in and squinting from a distance, perhaps his tattoos, buzz cut and goofy ca- dence would pass as Doncic himself. For some, taking the emotionally charged part of Doncic would be a challenge. But for Cline, a career actor who made his stage debut in an- other sports satire, Damn Yankees, it’s just another day at the office. He’s been a Mavs fan since the ‘80s, and says he got into acting during his senior year of high school when he realized he needed an art credit. More than 30 years later, Cline’s love for the craft hasn’t slowed, although his love for his hometown team might have. “I was in shock, devastated and really physically ill,” Cline says of the trade. “I didn’t watch any basketball until the finals. I’m an NBA2K guy. I didn’t buy 2K25.” After photoshoots, Cline sits at a table alongside the rest of the cast for the first full read-through, and he immediately steals the show. To comedic effect, Cline lays the very best and worst of Doncic fully bare, ranging from criticisms of his weight to his maturity. “He’s larger than life,” Cline says. “Ev- erybody knows who he is, so I’m really playing him as honestly as I can, being true to the emotion and the playfulness. There’s a lightness to him, too. If you watch him in these games, he’s having fun. So I think having some of that sprinkled in is going to be important.” Quintin Jones is towering over his peers in a sleek, mint-colored suit. He walks up to a makeshift white background with a no- ticeably calm friendliness, making a hilari- ous juxtaposition for what comes next. “Can you give me ‘I’ve done nothing wrong and I never will,’” beckons a market- ing assistant. Jones strikes an apathetic mean mug we’ve only ever seen in howls of player tunnels at American Airlines Center. That’s right, Jones has been cast in the role of Nico Harrison, Dallas’ Ozymandian prince — the sort of comic book-level, villain- ous backstabbing you can’t believe exists. If you live in Dallas, you also can’t believe any- one doesn’t share the same resentment to- ward Harrison. But Jones doesn’t. Not because he’s playing Harrison, but because he just learned who he was. ▼ Culture Christopher Durbin The actors, from left to right: Davian Jackson, Chad Cline, Quintin Jones, Jeff Swearingen and Elizabeth Evans. >> p13
