It takes a jock.

Ellenzweig, Allen

Allen Ellenzweig

Take Me Out by Richard Greenberg Directed by Joe Mantello Walter Kerr Theater, New York

WHEN Richard Greenberg's play Take Me Out first played downtown at The Public Theater several months ago by way of London's Donmar Warehouse, much of the buzz concerned its lavish display of male nudity. Not since Mary Martin had to wash that man right out of her hair had the act of lathering up seemed so novel a theatrical idea. Now Take Me Out has been moved to Broadway in a two-act instead of a three-act version. Though I can't speak to that change, having missed the former production, I can assure interested parties that a chorus line of well-built men taking a shower on stage will not hurt its commercial fortunes.

The scene in question is not a cheap trick, however, occurring in a play about baseball that considers the consequences to a team of a star player coming out as gay. The athlete in question, one Darren Lemming, has the additional distinction of being half black and half white. Until his gay declaration, he has managed to attain iconic status and has prepared no one for his burst of candor. As played by Daniel Sunjata, Lemming is a brash, cocky, smug gay rake who has had enough of the duplicity of the closet.

While the play's narrative revolves around the various reactions of his fellow Empires in pinstripes (think New York Yankees), the emotional heart of the play lies elsewhere. Lemming takes on a new business manager in the person of Mason Marzac, a sober gay schlemiel who bones up on baseball the moment the young hunk becomes his financial charge. Here, in the impish performance of Denis O'Hare, the playwright finds his mouthpiece. Mason is a seriously controlled and hemmed-in personality, but his growing adoration for the game of baseball loosens his tether and releases the pixie inside. In O'Hare's alternately droll and intoxicating demeanor, we get the great pleasure of watching a gay nebbish bloom, his heart gone loopy over the numerological wonders of nine players arrayed around a diamond over the course of nine innings. In interviews, Greenberg has admitted to his own conversion to the great American pastime. He obviously has poured his new obsession into the character of Mason Marzac.

If Mason is the uptight gay man getting in touch with his inner jock, Shane Mungit is an inarticulate redneck pitcher (think John Rocker of the Atlanta Braves) who publicly reveals the breadth of his bigotry toward his fellow teammates, and thus propels the climactic drama of Take Me Out. In reaction to a sexual provocation by Lemming-aimed at forcing Mungit's homophobic response--the inchoate feelings of this white trash phenom find their way into a wild pitch aimed at Lemming's best friend, another African-American player on an opposing team. Frederick Weller brings a sense of inexpressible grievance to the mullet-haired Mungit, and doing so, he matches the three-dimensional rapture of O'Hare's baseball-smitten gay number-cruncher.

Take Me Out does better at bringing into view the fault lines of race and class in team sports than in developing a fully realized comedy-drama. Its weakness lies in a central character, Lemming, whose arrogance and self-love never reveal themselves as the armor of a gay black man struggling for a place in the pantheon of American heroes. The internal tensions in his plight might have played out in his relationship to the upright Davey Battle, his rigorously moral black colleague from another team. Lemming and Battle seem fully prepared to enact the loneliness of the African-American athiete in their one heated exchange, but by then it is too late. Greenberg has not prepared us sufficiently for this theme, although he drops hints throughout Take Me Out that his protagonist's race has never been a problem for him. For certainly to be black and gay demands of a young man a reckoning with his own heart and his twin communities.

There is much to admire in Greenberg's writing. His comic lines are full of sass, sometimes coming as fast and furious as those in a 1930's screwball comedy. And in the character of his play's narrator, the loquacious and thoughtful Kippy Sunderstrom, Greenberg proposes the device of the Stage Manager from Our Town or the memory guide such as Tom in The Glass Menagerie. In this, he achieves a direct line to the audience and a sense of intimacy. As a work of art, Take Me Out has more height than depth-a gorgeous surface veneer, like that line up of young bucks soaping up in a locker room shower.

Allen Ellenzweig is the author of The Homoerotic Photograph.