Pictured FROM LEFT, Take Me Out: Danny McCarthy as Toddy Koovitz, Kyle Hall as Kippy Sunderstrom and Benjamin Sprunger as Jason Chenier. Photo by Michael Brosilow
BY CATEY SULLIVAN
Peruse the plot summary and you'll conclude Take Me Out is a play about a gay baseball player—to which many of us might well respond with a resounding yawn.
Baseball? That nine-hour-per-game sport featuring guys with necks the size of tree trunks? ZZZZZ. Gay men? Aren't they already the most ubiquitous life form in popular culture? Yawn.
At first blush, there seems to be little appeal in Richard Greenberg's play for those who view baseball with the same enthusiasm as dryer lint and/or are of the opinion that gay men are already monopolizing the entertainment universe, thank-you-very-much.
Ah, but surfaces can be—in fact usually are—deceiving.
'If it were just a story about a guy coming out, the play wouldn't be very good. That story's been told a thousand times,' said About Face Artistic Director Eric Rosen in a 'been-there-done-that' tone.
The triple-Tony winning Take Me Out is about the national obsession with sex and sexuality, about a nostalgia for an imagined, simpler, past, and about the universal coming-out process that all humans deal with as they mature and discover who they are and gain the courage to live accordingly.
Or so insists Rosen, who is directing the Midwest Premier of Take Me Out for About Face and cast members featured in the project.
The nostalgia ( many might term it ignorance and/or bigotry ) Rosen references was expressed when delegates to the Republican National Convention in New York City received a list of plays to avoid should they venture out to the theater. Take Me Out ( as well as Avenue Q and the civil-rights-era drama Caroline or Change ) was on the roster.
Like-minded fear and loathing comes to the fore in Take Me Out through the character of Shane Mungitt ( Kyle Hatley ) , a racist homophobe who spews about 'faggots' in the locker room and becomes involved in an ugly hate-crime.
'What's happening in the country is happening in the play,' Rosen said. 'In my reading of the play and my reading of current culture, there's a yearning for an imagined past, a time when men were men and women were women and things were safe. It's a longing for this world that never really existed,' Rosen said.
'This guy is someone who can't deal with change,' Rosen said of Shane Mungitt. 'It's just too much for him, and in a way, I can sort of sympathize. I think, well of course, if I had grown up in a certain era in a certain culture I, too, would think the idea of gay marriage was crazy.
For cast member and About Face co-founder Kyle Hall, Take Me Out is less about boys and balls than it is about self-discovery.
'When I saw this play for the first time in New York, the gay stuff was incidental and the baseball was foreign to me. I believe this is a story about the discovery of joy,' said Hall.
'To me, this is a step forward in gay representation in theater—you're looking at life through a certain lens here, but you aren't looking at it myopically,' said Hall.
The almost offhand nature that gay sex plays as a plot device is illustrated in a line delivered early on by superstar slugger Darren Lemming:
'If I'm gonna have sex, and I am, because I'm rich and famous and talented, and handsome, so it's a law, I'd rather do it with a guy. But when all is said and done, I'd rather just play ball,' Lemming ( played by Derrick Nelson ) announces.
As for the joy that Hall references, that comes out vividly in the character of Mason Marzac, the reticent, mousy gay accountant living a dreary, dull-to-invisible life until he signs to be Lemming's money man.
'Mason's out as a gay man, but as a human, he's living this small, closeted life,' said Tom Aulino, who plays Mason. ( A role that won a Tony for Northwestern grad Denis O'Hare on Broadway. )
'After he gets involved with baseball, he blooms; he begins to fully experience life and all its potential. He comes out as a human being. His life cracks open and totally changes him,' Aulino said.
The power of baseball to incite such blossoming develops as a metaphor of gem-like precision and beauty in Take Me Out.
'There's no clock in baseball,' Aulino said. 'You can change the course of the game at any moment. It's not like basketball where when someone's ahead by 40 points at the end of the last quarter there is no way the other team is going to win.
'In baseball, you can be down by dozens in the bottom of the ninth and still catch up. That's something Mason learns about life—that it's never too late.'
