Got it. And? ...
It can lead to tragedy.
Right. And? ...
Oh, yeah, there are a bunch of undraped male members onstage.
Noted. And? ...
And ... that's about it. Rehashed moralizing and penile peekaboo.
Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg's overpraised Tony-winner about a baseball slugger who comes out of the closet (or locker), is a PC treatise spliced into the metaphorical poetry of baseball. Thematically, its twin paradoxes are promising: a non-stereotypical gay man who plays a macho man's game better than most macho men; and the homoerotic undercurrent buzzing just beneath the guy-bonding hetero-heartiness of American sports.
But it says nothing about sexual identity and bigotry that any treacly "special episode" of some '80s sitcom hasn't mustered, and zero about baseball that Ken Burns hasn't mined for video-Americana or author Roger Angell didn't turn into indelible word pictures.
On Ron Zastrow's flexible locker-room set outfitted with showers (and on which scenes from a barroom chat to game highlights are cleverly played out), Director Walter Niejadlik's squad of Las Vegas Little Theatre actors play an almost flawless game. But like a pitcher who tosses a near-no-hitter and loses 1-0 because his teammates' bats go limp, the actors suffer from Greenberg's play choking in the clutch. Its gay-centric theme, preachy plot twist, pat resolution and obvious message are too neat to dramatically unnerve a theatergoer, effectively unsettle a bigot or even tap the untroubled conscience of a straight male—even if Take Me Out attempts that seduction by slipping its sociological sensibilities inside the framework of a sport that has reduced grown men to puddles in Hollywood homers such as Field of Dreams, Pride of the Yankees and Bang the Drum Slowly, or woven its charms into rapturous cinematic sonnets in Bull Durham and The Natural.
(Kudos, though, to LVLT's gutsy decision to attempt Take Me Out, a play not exactly tailored to its gray-to-silver-to-white-domed core subscription audience. The opening night crowd was a blend of younger and older, and if there were any walkouts, I didn't notice them.)
Alexander Pink plays Darren Lemming, the self-outed superstar of the New York Empires (read: Yankees). Pink's such an electric stage presence, such a basso profundo-throated powerhouse, that it takes time to realize Greenberg has made Darren—a handsome, seemingly studly, mixed-race team leader (shades of the straight Derek Jeter?)—little more than a cipher, a character outline, certainly no banner-carrier of gay pride or even just a man of conviction.
Sexually, Darren isn't a particularly active gay man, has few friends, isn't passionate about much and is even willing to walk away from baseball when the situation irritates him, leaving us little to relate to.
Once he's casually revealed his sexuality, the news is outwardly greeted with proper PC manners a la liberal NYC. Slowly surfacing, however, is his teammates' growing discomfort and once-slumbering bigotry. Coincidentally, post-announcement, the mighty Empires start losing.
The play's major catalyst—and oddly, it's most compelling character, dramatically—is Shane Mungitt (Chris Carrier), a John Rocker-like hick hurler from their Triple-A team who helps reverse the skid. He's also a monosyllabic mumbler—until he gives an interview blasting Gotham's "coons and spics" and especially, that "faggot" he has to shower with, setting a tragedy—and a moral lesson—in motion.
Unlike Pink, whose Darren is shortchanged by the playwright, Mungitt is a pitiable mutt who gives Carrier, an expressive and explosive actor, room to play both poison and pathos. But Greenberg's message gets muddled when we're invited to sympathize more with Shane's ignorance than Darren's circumstance.
TJ Larsen as Kippy Sunderstrom, Darren's locker-room pal, is our engaging host, toggling nimbly between impish quips and heartfelt narration, though Greenberg's storytelling device feels lazy.
Brian Hinson reaps the most audience love as Mason Marzac, the gay accountant assigned to manage Darren's financial affairs, and Hinson squeezes every cent out of Greenberg's sassiest character, spinning laughs into drama and back again on a dime. Initially smitten with a dire case of puppy love for Darren, he eventually falls just as madly for baseball, becoming Greenberg's swooning mouthpiece for the game's metaphorical parallels to American life. Though his observations are sweet old saws about the game recycled, Greenberg seems more swept up in baseball's poetic sway than notions of sexual identity and bias at the story's center.