You need not love basketball to marvel at this magisterial hoops drama from M Ensemble. Directed with precision and perfection by its writer, Layon Gray, the play dramatizes the tumultuous 1939 season of the New York Renaissance, a hardscrabble all-black basketball organization from Harlem, whose players overcame obstacles to win 2,588 games across segregated America. Did everything happen exactly as Gray presents it? That's doubtful, but veracity is immaterial: His production was a mesmerizing argument for poetic license — emphasis on the poetic. The players' practice drills became the tactile pulse of Kings of Harlem, the choreographed sprints, passes, and dribbles attaining a Zen-like quality that would make Phil Jackson smile like Buddha. It was basketball as ballet, buttressed by elegiac music selections, cinematic projections, heavenly lighting, and a fully immersive scenic design that transformed a theatrical venue into a hardwood basketball court with spectator seating on either side. Inspirational sports stories come and go, but M Ensemble's production lingers long after the final buzzer.