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The Ocean Run: Stage, Cast, and Performance in a Public Park Basketball Scene

This article investigates the production and re-production of a recurring pickup basketball game at a public park in Santa Monica, California. I argue that it is best understood as a recurring “scene”—an ecologically shaped, biographically significant, interactionally accomplished, and narratively organized pattern of social life—colloquially known as the “Ocean Run.” Drawing on Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, I suggest that the scene is constituted by the interrelation of the park’s socioecological landscape (“stage”), the diverse personal meanings that players construct through their participation (“cast”), and the practical work of re-creating the scene through situated interactions (“performance”). The park stage facilitates a sense of intimacy for players with very different personal relationships to each other and to the scene. Those players then actively mix themselves up, re-creating the scene through an “improvisational” style of team formation. Place, people, and action are dialectically related in the patterning of public life. This method of analysis is replicable in a wide variety of public scenes and sets up concrete grounds for comparison and theoretical generalizability.