'Take Me Out'

Take Me Out
September 24, 2004
Geffen Playhouse

“Take Me Out” tells the story of a baseball team whose star player decides to publicly announce that he is gay, for no reason, the player says, other than a self-professed need to be himself. The premise is a great setup for such discussion: where better than to create a microcosm of a society that favors heterosexuality than a professional sports team.
In straight-male driven world of professional sports, coming out of the closet raises all sorts of issues about homosexuality, homophobia and homosexuality’s place in a heterosexual world.

Unfortunately, the play’s premise is about the only thing that proves fascinating by the end of the night. Playwright Richard Greenberg packs the play with a myriad of issues, touching on the obvious issue, societal attitudes towards homosexuality, but also racism, what it means to be part of a team vs. being and individual, the nature of friendship and human relationships, baseball as a metaphor for life - the list goes on and on. What he does not do, however, is fully succeeds in exploring any one of the topics that he raises. It instead meanders, somewhat aimlessly it seems, over and under many of the various issues – acknowledging that they are there, but never confronting or resolving any of them. “Take Me Out” might be more successful if it instead focused in on one topic and fully explored it.

But perhaps most frustratingly of all, the central conflict of “Take Me Out’s” initial premise – that of the star player’s homosexuality – is never satisfyingly addressed. Or rather, it is addressed, but the play fails to successfully resolve the issue or provide even a satisfying discussion of it. For the most part, the team’s reaction to its star’s coming out of the closet is minimal and mostly positive. There are one or two the reactions of discomfort that come from the “stupid” teammates, who are portrayed as so clearly dunder-headed that we are left with no option but to view their comments as wrong. The villain of the play, who we meet later on, is an outrageously bigoted Southerner from a rural town in the Deep South who is not only homophobic, but is also violently discriminatory towards racial minorities. The audience has no choice but to see these characters as the losers in the debate about tolerance, for the only intelligent people are the ones talking about acceptance. There is no conflict when the other side of the issue is portrayed as so idiotic that none of their arguments hold up on their own merit. In the real world, the issue of homophobia is not a black-and-white case of enlightened tolerance versus ridiculous stupidity. Homophobia can and does come from people that would otherwise be considered intelligent, confident people – and they are also decidedly not from rural areas of the South. Greenberg wants to show that intolerance is illogical – but by portraying the conflict in such an unbalanced way, he raises little discussion of substance.

It should be noted that the production itself is uniformly well acted and performed. Written as a series of scenes and monologues strung together by the principal narrator’s (a teammate of the outed baseball player) recollection of events, the play offers many opportunities for the performers to shine individually. And the actors do – almost to the point where the performances might outshadow the play’s shortcomings. This was apparently the case on Broadway, where Denis O’Hare’s performance in one of the subsidiary roles was so overwhelming and sympathetic that audiences ended up loving the play. Los Angeles lacks such an overriding star performance, however, which in turn makes the play the focus of the evening. Unfortunately, the play itself does not hold up to such scrutiny.