Broadway Review “Take Me Out”: Jesse Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Patrick J. Adams Launch Perfect Game

If last week showed anything in our entertainment, it is that even the most orderly traditional ceremonies can be disrupted by the rogue explosion of the IDF, shedding crocodile tears on our heroes too. ask meRichard Greenberg’s 2002 play, which describes the fallout when a famous baseball player turns out to be gay, opens tonight on Broadway with a stunning triple recreation.

Featuring flawless actors Jesse Williams, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Patrick J. Directed by Adams, ask me It could also be a revelation to those who saw the original Broadway production nearly 20 years ago. My memory of the work is a sports star: you discover the angle, a new concept at the time, which over time, if not ordinary, at least, has become unheard of.

What amazes me now about Greenberg’s wonderfully crafted fable are the various dominoes that fall after the speech, namely how hate speech, with all its despicable ignorance and cruelty, can enter the most dubious places, adhering to they a mucus that never could. I figured he could push heroes into non-heroic deeds. As Greenberg seems to tell us, no one gets out unscathed when fanaticism and hatred arise.

A little background for those who didn’t read sports pages when the 21st century was brand new. Professional baseball player Billy Bean recently declared himself a gay athlete after leaving the sport, noting in an interview that only a player who has a star, like Derek Jeter, can get out while playing ball. Meanwhile, an Atlanta Braves player named John Rocker made headlines when he described New York in disgustingly racist and homophobic terms.

After a belated baseball makeover, Greenberg allowed real-life footage, along with his newfound obsession, to spin back and forth. ask me.

The show opens with Empire of New York player Kipi Sanderstrom addressing the audience and trying to communicate exactly when “the whole mess” began, and the seriousness with which he speaks quickly informs us that the “mess” is not. It was finished. . Something bad, very bad, has happened to the empires and Greenberg is taking the time to reveal it.

So, like Kipi does, let’s start over. One morning, Darren Lemming (the great Jesse Williams) said to himself, “What the hell? “I’m Darren Lemming and he’s pretty handsome.” At that moment, Leming, an Empire Jetter-type mixed-race star with unrivaled talent, tells reporters he’s gay. This “emblem of a man of racial harmony” and “the man of color you imagined you would never experience,” as his friend Kip puts it, made a culturally destructive statement with that oddity. Life is sure to be both invincible and inviolable.

And for a period of time he maintains invincibility. There are some sudden insults and compliments in a children’s locker room, but Lemming avoids the highly benevolent man he knows is above his game. Untouchable.

The Curveball comes with the cast of Shane Mungit (Michael Oberholzer), a jerk pitcher whose unscrupulous behavior and restraint pique the interest of his peers. Mungitt’s story goes back and forth: he grew up in an orphanage, his parents committed suicide, his vocabulary is so limited that he can only angrily pick “no good” in the face of yet another life-threatening abuse.

The curiosity aroused by this rookie turns to stunned fury when, in his own press conference, he describes his new teammates with truly shocking racist and homophobic epithets. Mangit’s play days seem to have been numbered until he apologized sincerely, albeit poorly written, which demonstrates his curse on poverty, ignorance and emotional scarcity. “I didn’t know these words meant anything bad, I’ve just been listening to them all my life,” wrote Shane. “The only thing I can do is shoot, the only thing I could do. I would not have offended anyone and I take full responsibility for my words. I have to be punished. “

However, Shane returned to the team to open his hands. Lemming, expressing his indignation at the team manager’s father figure, feels double pain when the manager stands up in more ways than one.

Lemming’s corporate manager, the newly-turned baseball star Mason Marzack (flawless Jesse Tyler Ferguson) is also urging Lemming to end his sudden interest in retirement at the end of the season. Particularly important is tomorrow’s match, in which Lemming will face off against his constant friend, superstar and rival genius Dave Beatle (Brandon J. Dirden).

When the wrong tone (maybe) goes wrong, tragedy strikes, Shane is just the most obvious culprit. Greenberg essentially opens a chronology of very bad days to show how more than one person behaved very badly, each insult and cruelty escalating the other, turning everyone into abusers and victims. The legacy of hatred.

Director Scott Ellis focuses on time and nuance, reflecting every thought in a thoughtful work; ask me Do nothing for free, including copious full frontal nudity of the backstage shower scenes. Here is an intellectual Kip characterizing a poetic vocabulary by mocking the results of Lemming’s speech, laughing at his companions and at the same time telling the truth:

“We have lost a kind of paradise,” he says majestically. “We see that we are naked. And our refuge? We don’t have any. We may want to assume defensive hostility, aggression. There is danger, we will become Shane Mungit. So our anger, our masculinity is lost to us. We are closed. We drowned in a bat. Let’s play short flies with bows. We are complaining. “

Or remember, after Shane (apparently) unscrupulously denied that Lemming was being abused by gays, that a previous trade with another player could indicate that Shane wasn’t lying at all. In this light, we realize that Shane’s list of unscrupulous attributes probably doesn’t include dishonesty, even if that fake apology letter doesn’t actually belong to him. To some extent, Shane is too deprived of self-awareness to be anything other than what he appears to be, a revelation made evident in Oberholzer’s gruesome scene when the full impact of his actions is clear.

Why ask me It does not take prisoners to realize how a person’s hatred casts an ugly shadow on all who have access to it, a corrosive force that pushes even heroes to non-heroic deeds. In a striking slogan that inevitably contributed to the 2003 Pulitzer Prize nomination (and Tony Award winner), business manager-turned-baseball evangelist Mason provides an unusual explanation of the sport: baseball, he says, is better than democracy. Because baseball “admits defeat”.

“Even if the conservatives tell you to quit and nobody will lose, the liberals tell you to intervene a lot and nobody will lose. Baseball says, “Someone will lose.” Not only does he say it, but he insists! So baseball achieves the tragic vision that democracy avoids: democracy is wonderful, but baseball is more mature. “

When Ferguson utters this word, he plays the character of a gay man who, to his surprise, discovers something of the greatest value in the world that he had ignored all his life, filling in some gaps, loving something better. Or worse. Baseball will give up later, it can be tragic, but what to do before spring?