About the Play:

Finalist for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Take Me Out has become a favourite of acting teachers for Male Monologues and Male/Male Scenes.

Take Me Out is a full-length drama by Richard Greenberg. The play examines America's obsession with baseball in an unusual context. A handsome, young, heavy-hitting major-league baseball player abruptly comes out at a press conference and declares he's gay during a season filled with racial conflict, violence and celebrity ego trips. The resulting fallout causes tension in that most exclusive of boys' clubs: the locker room of a major league ball team.

Take Me Out follows the story of a superstar baseball player who comes out of the closet as a gay man and the aftermath of his announcement. Darren Lemming, the biracial star center fielder of the fictional, world champion New York Empires, is young, rich, famous, talented, handsome and so convinced of his popularity that when he casually announces he's gay during a press conference, he assumes the news will be readily accepted by everyone. It isn't. Friends, fans and teammates react with ambivalence, and when the slipping Empires call up the young phenom Shane Mungitt to close their games, his prejudice against anyone different causes serious schisms to take place. Angry, lonely, guilt-ridden and confused, Darren finds some unlikely solace in the form of friendship with his new business manager, Mason Marzac – a brilliant but repressed accountant, who, as everyone around him copes with disenchantment, soon develops a maniacal interest in the game. With much publicized male nudity and hard-hitting questions about media celebrity, masculinity, sexuality, and race, Take Me Out is a no-holds-barred look at the win-at-any-cost hypocrisy of sports.

Take Me Out premiered in 2002 at Donmar Warehouse in in London's West End, then transferred to off Broadway's Public Theater before its Broadway berth at the Walter Kerr Theatre – where it won widespread critical acclaim and numerous prestigious awards, including the 2003 Tony Award for Best Play. It was revived on Broadway in 2022 at the Hayes Theater and won the Tony Award for Best Revival. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in professional and non-professional theatre productions.

Cast: 11 male (doubling)

What people say:

"…what an enchanting and enchanted take on baseball Mr. Greenberg has created…passionately personal and lyrically analytical. It's a sensibility that is so smart, raw and sincere all at once that you may find tears in your eyes…an unconditional, all-American epiphany…to cherish." — New York Times

"Take Me Out is a dynamic, involving play." — New York Post

"…a heady, heartfelt and enormously appealing romance…Perhaps never in my theatergoing experience have I experienced such an overwhelming — and spontaneous — surge of affection sent across the footlights." — Variety

About the Playwright:

Richard Greenberg is an American playwright and television writer, known for his subversively humorous depictions of middle-class American life. One of the most produced playwrights of his generation, he has had more than 25 plays premiere on and off-Broadway and has won the Oppenheimer Award for a debuting playwright, the first PEN/Laura Pels Award for a mid-career playwright and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.