Take Me Out (review)

The deliciously punny title of Richard Greenberg's most recent play invokes both the rich mythology that makes baseball an irresistible subject for writers in search of the American grain, as well as the violence, however muted and coded, that shores up constructions of American masculinity. The play, which moved to New York's Public Theatre after a critically acclaimed run at London's Donmar Warehouse, where it was part of an "American Imports" season, chronicles the immediate aftermath of an event that is (alas unsurprisingly) still fictional: a professional baseballplayer's coming out as a homosexual.

The player is Darren Lemming (another pun, perhaps, infinitely more cynical?), of mixed race, god-like physique, and almost terrifying self-confidence, star of the Empires (Yankee look-alikes to his Derek Jeter impression). His teammates supply the play with a gallery of American male types, including dumb jocks, sensitive athletes, and alienated automatons. More surprisingly and delightfully, they also make up a bountiful chorus of varied voices and verbal styles: the lucid self-accounting of Lemming himself (superbly played by Daniel Sunjata), the sub-verbal grunts of his nemesis Shane Mungitt (Frederick Weller), the cliché-ridden paranoia of Toddy Kovitz (Dominic Fumusa), the earnest narration of the well-meaning Kippy Sunderstrom (Neal Huff), the strange archaisms of his pious best friend Davey Battle (Kevin Carroll), even the untranslated Spanish and Japanese of the team members in this no-longer all-American pastime.

The muscular rhythms of the players' conversations are periodically interrupted by another music altogether, a poetry that is by turns lyrical and hilarious but always brilliantly self-aware, supplied by the play's one outsider—Lemming's business manager. Played with exquisite self-mockery by Denis O'Hare, this character gives unforgettable voice to the ecstasy of a certain rare kind of discovery—the discovery of a passion that suddenly makes him one with a world that has always excluded him. Like the playwright himself (as mentioned in numerous recent articles and interviews), this character discovers and celebrates baseball's unique gifts: its gift of time, for instance, ("There is no clock!" he exults), and its production of heroic moments and life-sustaining memories.

The American mythos and the verbal energy lodged within and released by the game of baseball provide a sociological bedrock upon which Greenberg erects his drama of national and sexual identities. The melodramatic formula that threatens to follow from the play's tabloid story premise is held at bay by an ambitious literary framework, signaled early in the play when Darren is compared to Billy Budd. As the play progresses, it reaches for an even grander model, none other than Hamlet, with which this play shares a programmatically self-concealing protagonist. Greenberg is reaching here for a modern tragedy of self-disclosure, a confrontation between a public figure who is deeply private and those who would "pluck out the heart of his mystery." While Darren struggles to hold onto his inner life and to resist its specularization—and spectacularization—by the scandal-mongering media that dogs a celebrity like him, the man who aspires to be his Horatio—his self-appointed best friend Kippy Sunderstrom—simply cannot establish the narrative distance required to celebrate, rather than exploit, his friend's courage. But if Kippy's all-too-human meddling reduces the play's tragic dimensions to the level of a well-made-play (complete with its archetypal device of the discovered letter), the lack of a controlling consciousness gives the play an intellectual complexity and a multiplicity of themes that allow it to transcend its melodramatic plot and sensational subject matter.

The intellectual texture of Take Me Out is, remarkably, both ideologically and psychologically informed. That the subject of baseball should elicit an exploration of American identity is hardly surprising; what is unexpected is the way this play locates the roles of class and sexuality in the construction of that identity. The pastoralism...