In this Tony Award-winning Best Play, playwright Richard Greenberg celebrates the personal and professional intricacies of America's favorite pastime. When Darren Lemming (Jesse Williams), the star center fielder for the Empires, comes out of the closet, the reception off the field reveals a barrage of long-held unspoken prejudices. Facing some hostile teammates and fraught friendships, Darren is forced to contend with the challenges of being a gay person of color within the confines of a classic American institution. As the Empires struggle to rally toward a championship season, the players and their fans begin to question tradition, their loyalties, and the price of victory.
At its best, 'Take Me Out,' which opened on Monday in a fine revival at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a five-tool play. It's (1) funny, with an unusually high density of laughs for a yarn that is (2) quite serious, and (3) cerebral without undermining its (4) emotion. I'm not sure whether (5) counts as one tool or many, but 'Take Me Out' gives meaty roles to a team of actors, led in this Second Stage Theater production by Jesse Williams as Lemming and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as his fanboy business manager.
Ellis places most of the play's gut punches - notably the two act breaks, though the second intermission is omitted - in the capably Expressionist fists of set designer David Rockwell and lighting designer Kenneth Posner. The momentary effects are achieved but curiously seem unearned, out of scale somehow to the human confrontations. More seamless is Mikaal Sulaiman's stellar sound design, layering cheers and gasps so you can't separate the recorded ones from the live. And isn't that how it should be? Ellis and Greenberg evidently share the belief that baseball is the most democratic of pastimes, perhaps even more so than theater, where a commonality of values often reigns. At the stadium, wealthy and strapped, left and right, white-collar and blue- come together in a celebration of teamwork and individual skill, and this play exploring individual identity knows that the group identity of 'fan' unites us. It almost makes a trip to the Helen Hayes a requirement in these polarized times.
Videos