Take Me Out
Opening Night: April 4, 2022
Theater: Helen Hayes Theatre
Website: 2st.com
When Darren Lemming, the star center fielder for the Empires, comes out of the closet, the reception off the field reveals a barrage of long-held unspoken prejudices. Facing some hostile teammates and fraught friendships, Darren is forced to contend with the challenges of being a gay person of color within the confines of a classic American institution. As the Empires struggle to rally toward a championship season, the players and their fans begin to question tradition, their loyalties, and the price of victory.
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April 4, 2022
But in performance, now no less than in 2002, when it had its New York debut at the Public Theater, it is mostly delightful and provocative. Perhaps especially for gay men, it is also a useful corrective to the feeling of banishment from a necessary sport.
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April 4, 2022
Nearly 20 years after its Tony-winning run in 2003, Take Me Out has returned to Broadway at Second Stage’s up-close-and-personal Helen Hayes Theater. Directed by Scott Ellis, it remains provocative, intelligent and engaging.
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April 4, 2022
The euphoria of discovery conveyed by Richard Greenberg through a gay outsider who becomes an impassioned baseball fan hasn’t dimmed a bit in the two decades since Take Me Out was first produced. Other things, however, have changed in director Scott Ellis’ finely tuned and superbly cast Broadway revival for Second Stage.
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April 4, 2022
Public and personal identities are constantly being examined, teased and tested in Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” his grand paean to baseball and ontological quandaries, which is receiving a starry and satisfying Second Stage revival at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway.
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April 4, 2022
A star athlete comes out as gay, and the narrator asks, “Why now?” Greeting that question with a shrug, the revival of “Take Me Out” from Second Stage is a down-the-middle throwback that neither connects squarely with the present nor meaningfully replays the past.
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April 4, 2022
Imagine a world where a superstar baseball player on par with Derek Jeter decides to disclose that he is gay. In 2003, Richard Greenberg did precisely that with Take Me Out and received the Tony Award for Best Play for his regressive efforts. Almost two decades later, his ableist and gay-caricature-laden affair has returned to Broadway, complete with its dated humor and obsession with the white gaze.
READ THE REVIEWApril 4, 2022
You might not be familiar with the ins and outs of the sport, but it’ll be hard to walk out of the Helen Hayes Theater after two hours and fifteen minutes without caring about the story you just watched unfold onstage.
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April 4, 2022
Despite winning the 2003 Tony Award for Best Play, Richard Greenberg’s deeply flawed “Take Me Out” did not seem a likely candidate for a major Broadway revival. Yet, under Scott Ellis’s insightful direction of a dream cast, this 2022 revival, which opened Monday at Second Stage’s Helen Hayes Theater, is deserved; the story of a star baseball player who comes out of the closet is suddenly anything but old news.
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April 4, 2022
With an impeccable cast headed by Jesse Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Patrick J. Adams, Take Me Out just might be a revelation even to those who saw the original Broadway production nearly 20 years ago.
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April 4, 2022
The old saying “there’s no crying in baseball” gets a shellacking in the fantastic revival of the play “Take Me Out,” which opened Monday night on Broadway.
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April 4, 2022
Move over, baseball: As it turns out, the most American pastime is crippling loneliness. Or at least an excellent case is made by the excellent revival of Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning Take Me Out, now enjoying a starry, limited run at the Hayes Theatre 20 years after its original premiere. Starring Jesse Williams as center field god whose untouchable aura comes hurtling down after he comes out, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as his fragile gay accountant, this production pitches isolation as the trembling thing hiding behind everyone’s mask.
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April 4, 2022
Twenty years ago, Richard Greenberg’s play Take Me Out premiered downtown at the Public Theater before it moved to Broadway, won a Tony for best play, and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer. Second Stage’s new revival, now running at the Helen Hayes Theater was scheduled to open when Covid shut the world down, but its opening right now feels like great timing. The wait was worth it.
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The production is, for sure, broad and embracing of an exuberant kind of theatricality, occasionally at the expense of the pace of a show that has to maintain a rush of ideas. Many of the laughs that come are as intended, but a few feel gratuitous. And the David Rockwell set is a rare disappointment from this gifted designer: there was an opportunity there to radically freshen the vistas of the work, but it offers few sharp edges and no real surprises.
That said, you’re watching a skilled and earnest ensemble. Adams makes for a very reliable narrator, but most of the best scenes involve the consistently superb Williams, whom you can easily believe as a real ball player and whose acting has the single quality most essential to all Greenberg plays: He never reveals too much at once.
April 4, 2022
The nightly standing ovations at the Helen Hayes Theatre for the excellent new revival of Richard Greenberg’s must-see autopsy on baseball are a testament to the watch cry “Play ball!” as well as the outdated but still socially accepted way to do it.
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April 4, 2022
A lot has changed in the world in the 20 years since the Off-Broadway premiere and subsequent Broadway transfer of “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s all-male drama about the epic consequences of a Derek Jeter-like professional baseball player coming out as gay. Notwithstanding, “Take Me Out” remains the same play, somewhat overlong and sensationalistic but absorbing and heartfelt, especially as demonstrated by the excellent Broadway revival produced by Second Stage.
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April 4, 2022
Take Me Out may have been written twenty years ago—when people were already buzzing about the possible comings-out of players in traditionally macho sporting bastions—but it cleverly eschews the most conventional narratives about LGBTQ people in sport and public life more generally.
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