Theater Review—

‘Take Me Out’ Deserves

Standing Ovations (Maybe Even The Wave)

By Julie Stern

HARTFORD — Joseph Conrad once said something to the effect that a person’s only real existence lies in the minds of the people who knew him. But Darren Lemming, star centerfielder for the world champion New York Empires and protagonist of Richard Greenberg’s wonderful Take Me Out, is an intensely private person, who refuses to let anyone close enough to get beyond his public persona of the superstar baseball player. And thereby hangs a tale of comic – as well as tragic –import, which TheatreWorks Hartford is currently presenting.

You may have heard that this Tony Award-winner for Best Play is about a Derek Jeter-like highly eligible New York bachelor of mixed race who makes a surprise announcement at a press conference that he is in fact gay. Well, that’s true.

And you may also have heard that, like Hair and The Full Monty, the play features a fair amount of full-frontal male nudity, with several scenes set in the locker room showers. Which is also true, and in a small theater, things are clearly defined. But that’s also like saying Huckleberry Finn is about falling off a raft.

Darren makes his decision to go public about his homosexuality after Davey Battle, an old acquaintance, preaches to him about the need to make choices in his life- to find his “passion” and do something meaningful. Self-righteous Davey, who is a star player on a lesser team, is actually telling Darren that as a black athlete he has a responsibility to be the kind of man he himself is: a devout Christian husband and father.

When he makes his statement, Darren assumes that his enormous popularity and his value to the team as a power-hitting, base-stealing, Golden Glove fielder will outweigh any misgivings on the part of the fans or his fellow ballplayers. Startled by their ambivalence, he feels the need for the reassurance of his wealth.

This leads to his first meeting with Mason Marzac, a geeky young financial genius who has inherited the job of being Darren’s business manager. Mason would seem to be a polar opposite to his famous client: socially uptight and physically graceless, he too is gay, but as he says, nobody would ever want to date him. He has no life, he has no friends, he just has his talent for making money.

His connection to Darren leads him to discover an interest in baseball for the first time. He follows the team, he crunches statistics, he goes to the games, he wears an Empires cap, he even does The Wave!

Meanwhile, the perennially victorious Empires start to lose games. Takeshi Kawabata, their ace pitcher, begins to flounder around the seventh inning, and the team is forced to call up a rookie closer from Double A. Shane Mungitt, the Arkansas hillbilly, has a devastating fast ball – they start to win again – but he is also a mean bigot, setting in motion a conflict that will have deadly consequences.

The acting in this play is universally superb. Schuyler Yancey has the perfect combination of  confidence and aloofness as the superstar who in his whole life has experienced nothing but total success, and has never known humiliation or shame.

Nat DeWolf alternates between embarrassing and endearing as Mason, who discovers that he can now converse with strangers and cabdrivers, but who also teaches Darren about honesty and self-knowledge.

Bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to Yankee Big Unit Randy Johnson, Michael Balsley is terrific as Mungitt, by turns whining and wheedling, and then spewing hatred. Tim Altmeyer gives a beautiful performance as Kippy Sunderstrom, the play’s narrator, and Darren’s closest confidante on the team, who trusts his intelligence and innate decency to be enough to enable him to smooth all troubles over.

Dan Whelton is delightful as a well-meaning young catcher who wants to assure Darren of his support.

Matt Montelongo is very funny as a macho moron who is intimidated by the prospect of sharing a locker room with a gay man. Ikuma Isaac, Jose Joaquin Perex and Anthony Aguilar Gallagher round out the roster of non-English speakers who use fierce gestures to get their points across.

Take Me Out is, after all, a baseball story; in its colorful assortment of characters it is reminiscent of works like Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly. Its ability to capture the mythic vision of America, and the belief in possibilities, it brings to mind Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.

As Mason observes in his enthusiastic paean to the game, baseball is the one game that doesn’t have a clock. You play until the nine innings are over, and everyone has had his chance to be a hero.

This is a show that deserves a standing ovation with everybody in the audience doing the wave, and it’s a play that you can enjoy profoundly even if you hate baseball.

(Performances continue until December 3; curtain is Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 pm, Friday and Saturday at 8, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons at 2:30. Additional Sunday evening (7:30) performances will be added in mid November; call the theater for details.

Tickets are $45 for Friday and Saturday nights, $35 for all other shows. Student rush tickets, subject to availability, are $10 at show time with valid ID.

TheaterWorks is at 233 Pearl Street in downtown Hartford. The box office can be reached at 860-567-7838.)