“Take Me Out” is a Home Run!

Craig Peterson and Lamar Legend in Take Me Out (John Ulman)

Take Me Out

Strawberry Theatre Workshop

Through June 22, 2019

It’s an emotional rollercoaster of a play that might instill a love of baseball in even the baseball-hatingest person! It’s a cautionary tale that words really matter. It’s a microcosm of society’s attitudes regarding the LGBTQ community with an offhand, high-self-esteem lead character. It’s an intensely well-written play by Richard Greenberg that won the 2003 Tony Award.

All of this is Take Me Out, now performing on stage by Strawberry Theatre Workshop at 12^th Avenue Arts. The tale tells of a superstar major league outfielder, Darren Lemming, played with pitch perfect swagger by Lamar Legend, whose contract is stratospherically high. In the middle of a normal press moment, Lemming casually implies that he’s gay, thinking it’s not really a big deal and nothing important will come from it. However, that casual utterance pings through the rest of the play like a pinball banging out crazy points.

 

The audience is helped along the way by narration, as player-friend Kippy Sunderstrom (a nicely-shaded performance from Trick Danneker) helps weave backward and forward in time to reveal all the strands of story that lead people to make decisions, large and small, that can never be undone.

While reaction from his teammates runs the gamut, there’s a new guy, Shane Mungut (Craig Peterson), a rookie relief pitcher who comes from the hardest of hard-scrabble lives but who pitches like a dream, and apparently all he ever learned was racism and bigotry of the most complete kind. He knows that better than he knows proper English.

The all-male cast also includes Nicholas Japaul Bernard (as Davey Battle), Josh Kenji (as Takeshi Kawabata), Miguel Castellano (as Toddy Koovitz), Roger Estrada (as Rodriquez), Tony Mangaña Jr. (as Martinez), Dylan Smith (as Jason Chenier) and Carter Rodriquez as Skipper the team coach. Every cast member pulls his weight in this play.

Jon Lutyens plays Mason Marzac, an accountant who awkwardly supports Lemming’s “entry” into his gay community while taking care of Lemming’s money. His journey from non-sports-watcher to baseball enthusiast is a beautifully hilarious one to watch.

Greg Carter’s direction brings out each character crisply. The dialogue is natural and the clubhouse feeling is also naturalistic with a lot of male nudity. Carter has set a shower above the center of the stage where key moments take place.

The script is tautly written and this is now the third Greenberg play (The Violet Hour and Three Days of Rain) done here over the last decade or so. He’s a great writer and this particular piece has much to recommend itself for as commentary on our societal prejudices, male bonding, sports obsessions, racism, and white privilege.

There are many moments that are laugh-out-loud funny, but Mungut’s choices of epithets is challenging, mean, and blunt. Peterson has a tough job, acting as a hateful, ignorant, limited guy, and does it believably.

Take yourself out and see this show. It’s a great evening. It will give you a lot to think about and talk about after, which is one way I judge a good night of theater!

For more information, go to www.strawshop.org or call 206-427-5207.