Take Me Out

The Donmar Warehouse’s American Imports season of new plays from across the pond fizzles out, rather than fizzes, with the world premiere of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out.

Fuelled by the playwright’s recent belated conversion to the game of baseball – an American national obsession to rival ours for football – he finds in it a metaphor for democracy itself, except he declares that baseball is better! “Democracy is lovely,” says Mason – a character who is clearly a stand-in for the author himself – “but baseball is more mature.”

Mason (Denis O’Hare) is a new friend and financial adviser to a star black baseball player, Darren Lemming (Daniel Sunjata), who has recently chosen to come out as gay. Darren has the wholehearted support of his best friend on the team, Kippy (Neal Huff), but not of his best friend off it, Davey (Kevin Carroll), who plays for a rival team. Nor does he count on the blind racial and sexual prejudice of newcomer Shane (Frederick Weller), as disadvantaged and dumb as they come but with what turns out to be a deadly skill in pitching ball.

While Greenberg’s play occasionally has balls (and the frequently naked actors more than prove that they do, too) in confronting these issues so forcefully, his meandering three-act work takes its time to get there. Like David Storey‘s play about rugby players, The Changing Room, this one is set largely off-pitch, in the team’s locker room; but even if the writing is sometimes overblown, Joe Mantello‘s production is pitch-perfect.

It is the performances that grab and grip you, rather than the predictable situation or declarations like “baseball is unrelentingly meaningful”. The only false or jarring notes struck are those of the playwright trying to convey his own epiphany in discovering the game in lines like that; it is greatly to the credit of the 11-strong, all-American cast that they transcend those grating assertions to completely inhabit and make us believe in the reality of its world.

– Mark Shenton