After twenty years, I’m surprised we haven’t seen the sort of discourse around Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out that other theatrical work has brought about after having some time away from the stage. Its first Broadway revival is now playing at the Helen Hayes in a Second Stage production directed by Scott Ellis and starring Jesse Williams and Jesse Tyler Ferguson. If nothing else, the second time around is creating a lot more discussion about the play’s big swings (sorry) if only because when it premiered twenty years ago, well, there just weren’t this many…opinions.
When I saw the revival, I was struck by how well the language has aged. Greenberg’s idea of putting deep existential pondering into the mouths of men toweling off after a game still creates the kind of dissonance that plays well to the ear for some reason. It’s the kind of spectacle that critics of local productions objected to because it didn’t read as authentic. Whether baseball players were offended by that or not, it missed the point.
None of this is real.
Take Me Out embraces its theatricality in a way that shows rarely do anymore. The best example I’ve seen recently was probably Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s. Greenberg uses the much-talked about nudity as the “you have to be there” gimmick that then lures you into a complicated world of religion, democracy, and masculinity—toxic or otherwise. Upon entering the theater, you’re made to put your phone into a sealed-up pouch in case anyone tries to get footage of the nude scenes. Strangely enough, at the dawn of YouTube, you could actually find clips of the original production billed as pornography—although once you see the scenes in question, it’s difficult to think of anything less sexual. Personally, I think we should be forced to put away our phones for every show—nudity or not. But that’s an editorial for another day. Cheers to the staff at the Helen Hayes though for having to deal with the angry patrons who can’t imagine not being able to check their text messages for two hours.
Much has been made about the equity of the play’s ensemble, and there’s good reason for that. While Greenberg has gone out of his way to give certain characters their moment to shine, much seems to be made of the otherness of the members of the team who don’t speak English. When it comes to pitcher Kawabata, played with a heartbreaking solemnity by Julian Cihi, that otherness is expressed in a poignant monologue at the top of what would be Act Three if the production took its two needed intermissions.
(This is the second revival on Broadway right now that’s trying to avoid its own length. I’m begging you—Lean in. The play needs both breaks.)
The problem with taking big risks is that sometimes you fall short, and in trying to tackle the topic of America’s melting pot, Greenberg doesn’t get there. He’s already trying to juggle so many things along with a plot that really only kicks into gear at the end of Act One. For while the show may be about Williams’ Darren coming out of the closet, it really centers around the introduction of a new pitcher named Shane Mungitt, played by Michael Oberholtzer.
When reviewing Plaza Suite, I said that a revival needs to answer the question “Why this show? Why now?” Shane almost seems to answer that question single-handedly. He was created before the word “incel” was household vernacular. When he arrived in the original production, he was something of a puzzle. We understood his racism and homophobia, but it seemed to be coated in a kind of humanity that created a discord different from the kind we felt hearing ballplayers talk about Melville.
Now, it’s not so puzzling. Not after several years of having the New York Times tell us we need to feel badly for guys catching torches in the streets shouting anti-Semitic slogans. To be clear, I’m not saying Greenberg wants us to sympathize with Shane, but like any good playwright, he wants the conflict to exist in our minds and not just onstage. That’s why when Oberholtzer plays Shane’s big moment in Act Three of the show, screaming “I want to play,” there’s a part of you that’s so unsettled by the whole thing, you do feel a kind of sadness bubbling up. The idea of a man who is brought to hatred through ignorance and cannot be changed despite the best efforts of a much smarter (and more academic) liberal seems to sting a little more these days.
That liberal is Kippy, the main narrator of the play, and perhaps one of a handful of narrators that actually seem to help a play instead of hinder it, played by Patrick J. Adams. Kippy is utilitarian for most of the play until he’s not. That seems to be the theme of many of the characters in the show. They help the plot, throw out a few bon mots, and then somewhere along the way, we come to find out they’re not quite who they appear to be, but exactly who we’d expect them to be. Kippy brings about the play’s main betrayal, and his relationship to Darren is one of the many platonic romances Darren experiences within the show.
Because, you see, everyone loves Darren. His coach/father figure, his accountant, and his best friend, Davey Battle, played by Brandon J. Dirden. They love him—until they don’t. The play is interested in exploring why they don’t when they don’t. It dances with a few different reasons—self-interest, self-preservation, and in Battle’s case—religion. It always seems to make the case that there are easy reasons behind the hard ones. Homophobia dressed up to look like something else. At the time the play was written, this would have been a novel idea. That you didn’t have to come right out and say you hated someone because of their sexuality. That you had to find a more politically acceptable reason. In that way, the play was ahead of its time. Where it now lags is the asexual way it paints Darren. Greenberg can be forgiven for this to some extent. In some ways, he needs Darren to be asexual in order to make the other characters discomfort around him appear even more comical. He also wants him to exhibit a kind of purity. The trouble for Williams is, it’s really hard to make purity interesting.
Commenting on how Williams does as Darren is difficult for exactly that reason. He’s getting the job done, but his part is mainly reactionary. Like Cliff in Cabaret, if you do it right, there isn’t all that much to talk about. Still, he deserves credit for not trying to make Darren more than he is, which is someone starting to rebuild his own identity. One place where the revival might have helped him along a little bit is with his relationship to that lovestruck accountant—Mason, played by Jesse Tyler Ferguson.
Almost any mention of Mason is going to include two things:
Denis O’Hare’s portrayal made him a star and he is the gold standard that all other Mason’s must live up to.
He has one of the best monologues ever written.
There are parts of the role that Ferguson fits into seamlessly. He understands Mason’s comic sensibilities. He has no trouble bringing forth the kind of enthusiasm Mason experiences once he falls in love with the sport of baseball via Darren. If he has any trouble, it’s in that monologue. It’s structured like a song and if a trap exists there, it’s in the way that it can be broken up into several smaller monologues. Ferguson falls into the trap so that by the time he reaches the end of the piece, you feel as though you’ve just listened to a Ted Talk rather than witnessed a revelation. Is it enough to taint the overall performance? Not at all. He’s still endearing and supplies the heart the play so desperately needs.
At first, it would seem that heart will come from Dirden’s character, which is what makes his turn in the final Act so cruel. The distance between what he’s trying to say to Darren and what he means is compounded by what Darren is receiving. Davey is proselytizing the idea of speaking plainly as he does everything but that. Darren is confused. We’re confused. Dirden does a remarkable job, but we’re left wondering if even the actors know where they stand when it comes to their interactions with each other. I began to wonder if the closeness of it all was hampering the play in some way.
You see, this play is classical in nature. It’s even commented upon by Kippy. We’re watching mythology at work. Gods and Legends. Darren’s fall from grace is biblical. There’s even a murder. All this happens on one of the smallest stages on Broadway. You feel as though you’re watching Henry V in a blackbox. Now, you can do Shakespeare in a blackbox, but you have to then conceive of that kind of production with the intimacy in mind. Here, that consideration doesn’t seem to have taken place. The production is still using the scope of the play to its advantage, but it’s not dealing with how small of a space it’s in, which means the surreality of the piece has to be side-lined in favor of a more presentational approach. Ellis just doesn’t have much room to stage it any other way, and the design all appears small as a result. David Rockwell’s scenic design, Linda Cho’s costume design, Kenneth Posner’s lighting design, and Bray Poor’s sound design all—like Darren—get the job done, but you almost wish Ellis could have deconstructed the piece the same way we reconceive Shakespeare any time we do it.
That being said, the play already asks so much of its artists. Maybe complicating it further would only leave us further unsure of what it is we’re meant to take from it. That’s not an insult—at least not from me. Like Mason and baseball, I still found myself moved numerous times at things that shouldn’t work or don’t line up evenly. Like baseball, great theater is sometimes great because of its flaws—not in spite of them.