Wendy C. Goldberg has spent nearly 20 years at the forefront of the theater industry. For 16 seasons, Goldberg, a College of Fine Arts professor of directing, served as the artistic director of the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, where she broke barriers as the first woman to head the conference since its founding 50 years ago. In 2019, she founded her own entertainment company, TheFrontOffice, while also serving on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The following year, she was appointed chair of that same jury.
To add prestige to a long list of accolades, Goldberg is currently making waves as executive producer for Amazon Prime Video’s new four-part docuseries, “Uninterrupted’s Top Class Tennis. The series follows rising tennis stars Ariana Anazagasty-Pursoo, Joseph Oyebog, Jr., Stephanie Yakoff, and Stiles Brockett as they make their way to the Orange Bowl, a pivotal tournament for young tennis players. Set to premiere July 18, the series is an expansion of the Top Class franchise, spearheaded by basketball legend LeBron James’ media company, SpringHill.
“It is my first documentary project as an EP, and the drive and skill it all takes is akin to running a theater company or any sort of large complicated work for the theater,” says Goldberg, who also won the 2016 National Medal of Arts from the White House. “It’s about vision, organization, communication, and execution.”
BU Today spoke with Goldberg about her personal ties to tennis, her involvement in Uninterrupted’s Top Class Tennis, and what viewers should expect from the series.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Goldberg: I grew up on the tennis court. From age 10 to about 18, I trained as a junior player, and played US Tennis Association tournaments in the Midwest, and was a two-time state champion in Michigan. I spent all summers and many winters working on my game. I knew, even at that time, I wanted to make a show related to this phase of life, and this coming-of-age moment through the lens of tennis. What does that life look like? How do you, as a parent, best support your child? But in 1991, I put my racket down and decided against playing college tennis, and started training to be a [theater] director.
Goldberg: Although the majority of my career has been spent directing and developing new work for the theater and building artistic programs, I have always worked in other mediums. In 2017, I finally started developing this junior tennis show. I took a year to understand how the show could potentially play out and who the important partners would be. In 2018, I began a relationship with LeBron James’ [production companies] Uninterrupted and SpringHill; at the time, I had also been working on potential docuseries about the great basketball coach of the UConn Huskies, Jim Calhoun, who I had worked with at the O’Neill. This is how I originally met SpringHill and Uninterrupted.
That show didn’t end up getting made, but I then approached them about this tennis [series], and we decided to partner and make it. It took two more years to get into a real position to begin filming…unfortunately, the pandemic sidetracked us for a while. The champion of the show has been Phil Byron (COM’09), head of unscripted projects at SpringHill/Uninterrupted, who is also a BU grad. We didn’t know each other when this process started, so once we realized we had the BU connection in common, we would speak fondly of our BU experiences.
We started shooting the show in earnest in 2022, eyeing becoming the second installment of a show that Uninterrupted already produced on Amazon Prime Video, Top Class Basketball. That show followed the Sierra Canyon School basketball team that Bronny James [LeBron’s son] played on and ran for four seasons. Amazon decided to take a leap with us and pivot to tennis, so we will be the first series dedicated to another sport to follow the basketball show. We also partnered with professional tennis player Sloane Stephens, who was an incredible resource and helped us focus our narrative.
As executive producer and creator of the show, my role covers every aspect of preproduction and production. I wanted to be hands-on, as I was the tennis expert in our midst, and I had nurtured many of the relationships to get us into this position to make the show: casting, storytelling, figuring out what we would cover or not cover, spending time with the families and coaches, and advising our production team. Also, as we edited and made cuts of the show, [I was] going through rounds of notes with Uninterrupted and Amazon.
Top Class Tennis follows four young junior tennis players in their training and their competition through a seminal junior tournament, the Orange Bowl, held annually in Plantation, Fla. This is a historic tournament with significant champions who have won it over the years, ranging from John McEnroe, Roger Federer, Andy Roddick, Frances Tiafoe, and Coco Gauff. If you win this one, you’ll likely turn pro fairly quickly.
This has been a massively long effort of constantly trying to move this project forward, and not giving up during all the obstacles—like the pandemic and worldwide shut down of sports and entertainment—and I am so incredibly proud of the results. I am hopeful that it excites more people to play tennis, creates additional access in the sport, and despite the expenses associated with the game, shows families from varied and diverse backgrounds making it work—all of the families participating have interesting stories, and that’s also what drew me to them.
I will continue to make this sort of work and have a few projects already in development, but my hope is we get to make season two of Top Class Tennis [soon]. It is my first documentary project as an EP, and the drive and skill it all takes is akin to running a theater company or any sort of large complicated work for the theater. It’s about vision, organization, communication, and execution.
Watch Uninterrupted’s Top Class Tennis on Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Freevee on July 18.
