Award-winning 'Take Me Out' tackles homophobia in professional sports

Chicago, IL - With baseball season ended, you won't have the chance to catch a game at either U.S. Cellular Field or Wrigley Stadium until next year, but Eclectic Theatre Company is giving audiences a peek inside the locker room with their run of "Take Me Out." The show, a Pulitzer finalist that opened in London in 2002 and won the Tony for Best Play in 2003, tells the story of a star baseball player who comes out while an active member of his sport (something that was still a decade away when the play premiered) and the attitudes and consequences that surround his decision.

"When I went back and re-read the play as we were doing play selection last year, the timing just felt right," David Belew, the show's director, told ChicagoPride.com. "Jason Collins had just come out, and the Michael Sams story was about to hit. What would happen if one of baseball's biggest stars came out? How different would the reaction be today than it would have been when this play debuted 10 years ago? It's an interesting idea."

"One of the reasons we chose the play was precisely because of how incredibly relevant it has become, with professional athletes coming out... however, one of the reasons I really wanted us to do this play was because it looks at the coming out story from a different angle," Andrew Pond, an actor who is also one of Eclectic company's founding members who helps select material, added. "Darren comes out but for him the event is not a huge thing... He says to Kippy: 'This seems to be a bigger event in your life than it is in mine.' And he bristles at the idea of being perceived as a victim. I thought that watching someone with that attitude deal with the reactions and overreactions that surround that announcement was interesting. It seemed to me to be a coming out story we hadn't already seen before."

The show opens on the aforementioned Kippy, a baseball player who considers himself the best friend of Darren Lemming, the team's unabashedly egoistic star (Belew thinks of him as Derek Jeter-esque) who has just come out of the closet. The reactions to this news vary across the team. An umpire is almost too supportive and congratulatory -- the awkward, bumbling friend who's unaware how to breach the subject -- and another player immediately makes it known how uncomfortable he is changing in front of the newly outed Darren.

In addition to exploring themes of homophobia, "Take Me Out" delves greatly into race, religion, masculinity and the isolation that can accompany all of these. Darren is mixed, while Kippy, the umpire and another player are white and the team's two Latino players are the only ones in the show without last names. The original pitcher, a Japanese immigrant said to speak little to no English, is perhaps the most obvious example of isolation on the team, until he's replaced by Shane, an ignorant, but not necessarily malicious white southerner whose string of racial epithets at a press conference leaves him without friends to turn to.

"There is not much subtlety to the themes of racism and homophobia in this play, so they were always a big part of the discussion," actor Charlie Rassman, who plays Kippy, told ChicagoPride.com. "Each character, while a part of a team, also finds themselves isolated in their lives, whether it's by their superstardoms, language barriers, or just plain social awkwardness. By exploring this theme of isolation, it has turned what could have been a very surface-level approach to heavy subject matter, into real people, dealing with their own struggles, and thrown into a whirlwind of drama."

The show itself varies from lighthearted, to heartwarming to incredibly uncomfortable (but necessarily so). The storyline itself twists and turns in a way that seemed to catch the audience as a whole off guard, including a very intense scene near the end of the play after which one woman in the audience exhaled audibly -- something that accurately expressed the extreme tension pervading the room.

"It's emotionally draining on us too! At least that has been my experience," Chris Rozenboom, who plays Shane, commented. "I am usually pretty good, but my last scene playing Shane wears me out... Shane says some awful things that I myself couldn't even think up. I wanted to make the character real, not a caricature of some hillbilly. I decided to go all out on it, and in the end it is exhausting but totally worth it."

Most of the show takes place in the fictional New York City baseball team's locker room, which serves as the main backdrop in the small blackbox-style theatre space. "Take Me Out" is an all-male cast (although their stage manager is a woman), something that the actors say was appropriate in fostering the kind of team attitude pervasive in the fictional club house. Because so much of the show takes place in front of the lockers, with a few shower scenes as well, almost every member of the cast is seen completely nude on stage at least once.

"The fact that there are no women in this play has added to the feeling that we truly are in a 'situation of men,' both in the world of the play, and off-stage," Rasmann said. "We actually discussed this after one of our previews, that if there was even one woman in the show, we would find ourselves censoring ourselves and covering up, both physically, but emotionally as well. Being surrounded by a group of men that are all going through the same thing has created a certain level of comfort, and therefore freedom, to create."

Much of the rehearsal process involved analyzing the issues and themes so obvious in the play, with the diversity of the cast adding to the overall discussion. The actors cross the same lines of race and ethnicity as their characters and, of the cast, there are four who are gay, as well as one of the understudies and Belew himself. Three gay actors play straight for the show (Ruben Adorno, who plays the outed Darren, is gay) and the straight Pond plays Darren's new (and also gay) business manager who feels he doesn't quite "fit in" to the gay community.

"As far as the subject matter goes, I think it's probably less weird for me as a straight guy in theatre to deal with it, because I've spent the last 20 years working with members of the gay community in almost every aspect of my career," Pond said. "As a straight man who's been cast as gay several times in my career, from farces to dramas, it's never seemed weird or odd... I play gay characters the same way I play straight characters. In my opinion, the only difference between the two is who they go home with at the end of the day. And that's not something you can play, so you play the person. And that's one reason I love playing Mason, because his sexuality isn't the main thing about him. It's his isolation and his discovery of finding something that he can belong to."

"I first read this play because of the content alone, and was so excited when I saw that Eclectic Theatre was doing the show," Rozenboom said. "I myself have had my fair share of homophobia directed at me growing up in a very conservative town. I like an opportunity to express that homophobia hurts even as a grown man. Words do hurt, and no matter how progressive we are as a country it is still not good enough. If this show changes just one person's look on homophobia, and what it can do to a person... then I did my job."

"[It] doesn't hurt getting to see cute boys in baseball outfits either," he added.

"Take Me Out" runs through Sunday, Nov. 2, with shows Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., as well as two Saturday matinees on Oct. 25 and Nov. 1. The show is on the first floor of the Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N Southport Avenue, and tickets can be purchased by visiting eclectic-theatre.com.