Take Me Out starring Jesse Williams and Jesse Tyler Ferguson on Broadway Tickets

By: Richard Greenberg
Director: Scott Ellis
Lighting: Kenneth Posner
Sound: Bray Poor
Design: David Rockwell
Costume: Linda Cho
Cast list: Jesse Williams (as Darren Lemming), Jesse Tyler Ferguson (as Mason Marzac), Bill Heck (as Kippy Sunderstrom), Michael Oberholtzer (as Shane Mungitt), Brandon J. Dirden (as Davey Battle), Julian Cihi, Hiram Delgado, Carl Lundstedt, Ken Marks, Eduardo Ramos, Tyler Lansing Weaks

The ugly underside of America’s favorite pastime comes to the surface in Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg’s timely and powerful work about what happens when a professional athlete gets personal off the field. Take Me Out interrogates long-held American traditions, the nature of fandom, and how much an individual must sacrifice in the name of victory.

The Take Me Out play sees Darren Lemming come out as gay at the height of his Major League career. The fan response is mixed — but that’s nothing compared to the reaction from Lemming’s teammates in the locker room, whose unspoken prejudices come to light. Lemming had thought himself above the bigotry and impossible standards that face other athletes of color, but he must now face them.

The original Take Me Out production won three Tony Awards, including for Best Play in 2003, and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize For Drama in the same year. Even though the Take Me Out play is inspired by an American sport, the show had its world premiere in London at the Donmar Warehouse in 2002, before moving off Broadway to The Public Theater later that year. The production then transferred to the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway in 2003.

Take Me Out has received widespread acclaim for its unflinching exploration of intolerance, self-acceptance and toxic masculinity — themes which resonate just as powerfully today. Greenberg “turns baseball into something like grand opera,” Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times when the play premiered, declaring Take Me Out “an unconditional, all-American epiphany that, in these days of fretful ambivalence, is something to cherish.”

What to Watch For

• History repeats itself! Take Me Out won Best Play at the Tonys in 2003, and Denis O'Hare won Best Featured Actor for playing the gay accountant Mason Marzac. In 2022, the show won Best Revival of a Play, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson won Best Featured Actor for his performance as Mason.
• Some of the events and characters in Take Me Out are reportedly based on real people. Darren is said to be based on Derek Jeter, and his team, the New York Empires, stands in for the Yankees. Darren's bigoted teammate Shane Mungitt is reportedly based on former relief pitcher John Rocker, and Mason Marzac, who becomes a huge baseball fan overnight from nothing, reflects Greenberg himself. He similarly got interested in the sport after the 1999 record-breaking Yankees season.
• Greenberg wrote Take Me Out to imagine what would happen if a Major League Baseball player came out during his career; when the play premiered in 2002, none ever had. As of the 2022 revival, that's still the case.
• Grey’s Anatomy is Jesse Williams’s most famous credit, but he’s also known for the films The Butler and Band Aid, and for producing the Oscar-winning short film Two Distant Strangers.
• More than 25 plays by Richard Greenberg have premiered on and off Broadway in New York City, including The Perplexed, The American Plan, and the Pulitzer finalist Three Days of Rain.
• The original 2003 production of the Take Me Out play was directed by Joe Mantello. Later that same year, Mantello staged a new Broadway musical named Wicked.