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Take Me Out is a new work by Richard Greenberg, which played in London where it was produced by the Donmar Warehouse and then off Broadway in New York at the Public Theater before moving to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater. So, while Take Me Out is a new play, it is a play that has been around the bases a few times.
It is a remarkable play about baseball, at least on the surface. It is also a play about “a mess” that gets unraveled in the course of two acts (the play was in three acts when it played at the Public Theater. Some very good re-editing and directorial changes were made before it reached Broadway. “The mess” is presented to us by the team's star short-stop, Kippy Sunderstrom. He is a little like the stage manager in Our Town — a character who talks across the fourth wall. The mess, as Kippy explains it, begins with Darren Lemming, the “New York Empires” star center-fielder, who is half-white, half-black, a leader on the field, an inspiration off the field, the holder of a contract worth over $100 million, and, by 10 minutes into the action, lets it be known that he is gay. And so the play is set in motion.
How is the team going to deal with the fact that their star center-fielder could have been “an interior decorator”? How does the team deal — with the media, with one another, with the locker room, with the shower room (there is a lot of male nudity — a lot) — when one of their own is openly gay?
This problem only gets worse when a pitcher, a much-needed closer (the Empires have begun to lose a lot of games in the late innings), a closer, Shane Mungitt, a star is brought up to the Empires. It gets worse because Shane is not only a closer “with an ERA under 1” (a very, very good closer), but he is also a bigot, a racist, and a homophobe: a caldron of unspoken rage, a rage that may best be left where it lies, unsaid — but of course this is a play, and so sleeping dogs never lie still for very long. And so, in Act 2, his rage having been stirred, Shane thro