A lot can change in nearly 20 years.
Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s imaginative comic tragedy about the fallout after a top-of-the-world baseball player casually decides to announce he’s gay, debuted on Broadway in February 2003. Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 Supreme Court decision finding no right to private sex acts between same-sex partners, was still the law of the land. Nowhere in the United States could same-sex couples legally marry. And no active player in any of the big four American pro sports leagues had ever come out as gay.
Indeed, a lot can change: By the time Take Me Out closed at the Walter Kerr eleven and a half months later, the Supreme Court had found, in Lawrence v. Texas, a right to private sexual activity. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had determined that its state constitution guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry. Later, in 2015, Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal nationwide. And yet, as of today, in America’s big four pro sports leagues there have been two out gay players—one, the NBA’s Jason Collins, retired one season after coming out; the other, the NFL’s Carl Nassib, was released a few weeks ago by the L.A. Raiders. Which means that, right now, there are once again no active gay players in any of the four big pro sports leagues.
In some ways, not a lot has changed in nearly 20 years.
That is not great for the arc of the moral universe (which in any case feels these days to be nearly collapsing in on itself). But it is good news for the excellent revival of Take Me Out that opened tonight at the Hayes, where Greenberg’s work somewhat surprisingly feels just as of-the-moment today as it did almost two decades ago.
[Read Bob Verini’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Take Me Out debuted in Bloombergian, prosperous, post-9/11 New York, when things were looking up and the Yankees had won four out of five World Series at the tail end of the 1990s. The team was led then by shortstop Derek Jeter, handsome, disciplined, well-mannered, biracial, superhuman, beloved. Greenberg’s flight of fancy was to consider that someone just like Jeter—someone to whom everything came naturally, to whom the normal laws of gravity seem not to apply—might see it as no big deal to tell the world, and his teammates, that he’s gay.
Instead, when the Jeter-like Darren Lemming (Jesse Williams, the Grey’s Anatomy star) outs himself, he sets himself and his team, the Yankee-like Empires, on an inexorably tragic path.
The tale is narrated by the “intellectual” teammate, Kippy Sunderstrum (now played by Bill Heck), and has a second quasi-narrator in Mason Marzac (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who needs no introduction), the nebbishy gay business manager who’s been assigned to Darren’s account and, charmed by this newly gay hero, suddenly falls in love with the sport of baseball. The clubhouse is rounded out by a roster of archetypes, plus a stalwart skipper, who ends up being not quite as noble as he at first seems. There’s also Darren’s best friend, a player on a rival team, Davey (Brandon J. Dirden) who happens to be a religious family man, who inadvertently sets the pending crisis in motion and who, inevitably, suffers most for it.
Greenberg’s script remains as sharp and funny as it was 20 years ago, full of both quippy one-liners and wise monologues on the meanings of life and baseball. Ferguson gives an extraordinary performance as Marzac, wracked with awkwardness, thrilled to be star-adjacent, tearing through those philosophical monologues. As narrator-intellectual Kippy, Adams is equally strong, the even-keeled, avuncular center of the plot’s chaos. Williams is the production’s weak link, playing a cipher but with such cool affect as to drain this allegedly magnetic center-field star of any real charisma.
(A side note on Williams’ who’s-who bio: A recurring joke of Take Me Out is that Darren considers himself nearly God. Williams describes himself as an “actor/director/entrepreneur and activist” who “is among the most impactful entrepreneurial faces in tech today” who “famously accepted the BET Humanitarian Award in 2016” [italics mine], and I can’t tell if this is a character-embodying parody.)
Scott Ellis’s staging is brisk and effective, David Rockwell’s sets impressionistically evoke Yankee Stadium, and Bray Poor’s sound design plays amusingly with the sounds of the ballpark. The nude shower scenes remain, as they must, both to force theatergoers to confront the locker-room anxiety at the center of the paucity of out gay athletes and also because even a nonprofit’s gotta put butts in the seats.
Two decades later, Take Me Out in some places shows itself a bit flabby. It’s never clear why Darren and Davey were ever best friends; they don’t much seem to like each other. When Darren’s entire personality is to float apart and above, it’s strange that he’d be so undone by the up-from-the-minors bigot who insults him. And the two-and-a-half hour runtime can, by its end, feel somewhat overlong, although that’s what happens when you include two different narrators (Kippy as the straight insider, to talk baseball; Mason as the gay outsider—and presumed authorial stand-in—to wax admiring and whimsical).
But it’s still relevant, still visceral, and still crackerjack entertainment.
Take Me Out opened April 4, 2022, reopened October 27 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre and runs through January 29, 2023. Tickets and information: takemeoutbway.com
