The real Nadal is not gay, and his longtime girlfriend, Xisca Perelló, is a frequent courtside fixture at his matches. But in Gil-Sheridan’s fantastical, farcical script, Nadal, as played by Juan Arturo, is an exaggerated embodiment of the 16-time Grand Slam champion who finished this year atop the men’s rankings. To keep the play grounded in unreality, Rafa is surrounded by surreal side characters, including a scorned one-eyed cat.

“It’s not what would be akin to a biopic; Rafa functions as symbol in the play,” Gil-Sheridan said. “I think, in that way, so many of these top tennis players function as symbol to us. Like Serena Williams: She is such a huge symbol in our culture. But who is Serena the woman versus Serena the symbol? I think it’s similar for Rafa. And for me, as a gay man, him as a masculine ideal is what I’m looking at. So it’s kind of him, and kind of not him. It’s a funny thing. He’s not being portrayed as a gay man; he’s being portrayed as a gay icon.”

Arturo, a Nadal fan since watching him on TV in Spain during his gold medal run at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, said he had to work to make sure his portrayal of the well-known tennis player was something audiences could “reconcile with the actual human being.”

He said he watched video of Nadal’s matches — incorporating, for example, his signature ear- and nose-touching tics in his preserve routine — and “hit the gym, hard.”

“There’s a moment in the play where the trainer comes up and starts examining my muscles onstage, with the line ‘exquisite abdominals,’ and I thought: Oh, man, I need to get to work,” Arturo said. “But that work kind of helped me get in the mind-set of it, because people who go to the gym a lot have a different way of holding themselves and acting around people. It helped me find my way into the character a lot.”