Take Me Out (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of English literature and composition. In the following essay, he examines why Darren Lemming remains a sympathetic character, despite his behavior in the play.

In his play Take Me Out, Richard Greenberg imagines the day, which by all reasonable estimates cannot be long off, when a major league baseball player will publicly announce that he is gay. Of course, like most other persons who have successfully broken down invisible social barriers, Greenberg's fictional center fielder Darren Lemming is an extremely talented player, whose dominance of the game is widely accepted. This removes any question of whether gay players are as capable as straight players. The fact that Lemming is, in fact, a superstar earns him more freedom from his fans than a lesser player would enjoy.

The play illustrates how the world reacts to Lemming's sexual orientation when another player, Shane Mungitt, makes a harsh public reference to having "a faggot " on the team. Not only are those viewing the play left with dropped jaws by the disrespect shown to Lemming, but Greenberg makes it clear from Mungitt's immediate suspension from Major League Baseball that baseball fans in the world of the Greenberg's play side with Lemming. They continue to consider Lemming a hero and will not accept a verbal assault against him. Any ambivalence in how the fans feel about the opening of baseball to gays is mild and contained: one character mentions that Lemming's commercials have been shifted to late-night television, but that is a much more measured reaction than pulling them from the airwaves completely. Nothing is said of riots outside of stadiums, of increased violence against gays, or plummeting ticket sales, all of which conceivably might happen under such circumstances.

Greenberg establishes Lemming's popularity very early in the play, at the same time that he acknowledges the clear contrast between the way homosexuals have been excluded from professional sports and the ways that racial minorities have gained acceptance. Kippy Sunderstrom, the clubhouse intellectual who narrates much of the play's back story, explains within the first few lines that Lemming is the product of a white father and a black mother, noting, "Even in baseball — one of the few realms of American life in which people of color are routinely adulated by people of pallor, he was something special: a black man who had obviously not suffered." These few lines set the tone of the play, and of the public's mood, in several ways.

For one thing, this line tells audiences, in case they did not know it, that the color line has been rendered all but irrelevant in the world of professional sports. It holds as true in the world of this play as it does in real life: there may be a few fans here and there who might hold back from supporting a player of a certain race, but expressing such a view would certainly mark one as an oddity among true sports fans.

Another thing the quotation reveals is Darren Lemming's complete dominance of the game of baseball. He is not just "adulated," which would be good enough for an ordinary sports hero, but he is "special" in addition to that. Lemming is established as being among the best of the best from the script's first page on.

The third and most unstable idea that comes out of Sunderstrom's sentence is the actual reason why Lemming is thought of so kindly by his fans. If this quotation is correct, several assumptions are running through the mind of a fan who accepts Lemming. One is the assumption that most black players have to suffer to reach the major leagues. Another is that audiences have heard so much about black players who have suffered that they find Lemming, with his happy, well-adjusted background, to be a refreshing change. The last is that Darren Lemming has had such a smooth life that the lack of suffering in his background is obvious.

While Lemming's widespread popularity is taken as a given at the beginning of the play, the truly surprising thing is that it holds up until the end, regardless of who he shows himself to be in the intervening time. Darren Lemming is not at all humble. He acts toward both his teammates and his fans as if he deserves every bit of honor given to him, plus more. He is disgusted with fans who have the nerve to offer him compassion after he has been publicly insulted, feeling that compassion brings him down to the level of a common person: they should envy him instead. He rails against people who try to understand him, pouts when his word alone is not enough to have Mungitt thrown out of baseball, and mocks the people who adore him. By all rights, Lemming should wear out his welcome with the theater audience by the time Take Me Out is over. When the final curtain falls, however, Greenberg leaves audiences feeling more sympathy for Lemming than for Davey Battle, the character who was killed by a wild pitch, or for Mungitt, the character whose mental and emotional shortcomings lost him his chance to do the one thing that he really understands.

To some extent, empathy for Lemming is the natural outcome of the play, its only proper, satisfactory conclusion. The story starts out with a player who has everything he could want in his professional career but lacks the ability to love freely, so it is reasonable to feel that the play has reached its fulfillment once he finds someone to love. Audiences may have doubts about Lemming's hubris throughout the play, but, like the dramatic convention of bringing up a wedding at the play's end, no matter how contrived or remote, to signify a happy ending, the budding relationship between Lemming and Mason Marzac in the last scene lets everyone leave the theater feeling good.

Greenberg goes further than just providing a happy ending. He also makes it easier to sympathize with Lemming, regardless of how the character might feel about such sympathy, by showing those characters who oppose him to be misguided, foolish, and even evil.

In this play, it is sadness, not anger, that dominates the clubhouse mood after Lemming's orientation is acknowledged. This is best expressed in the letter that the team's manager, William R. Danziger, sends to Lemming soon after Mungitt has humiliated him publicly. Danziger is not at all equivocal about his feelings for Lemming: he expresses his great regard for him as a player and as a man. By saying that he would wish that if his son were gay he would have a lover like Lemming, Danziger shows that he has no fear of homosexuality. Still, despite his respect, it distresses him that Lemming has introduced homosexuality into baseball. Danziger is a man who loves the game, and he regrets seeing things change. He does not speak with anger, but he clearly is not happy with this turn of events. His attitude seems to be like that of most baseball fans in the world of Greenberg's play: disappointment and acceptance.

Of course, the central relationship in the play is the one between Darren Lemming and Shane Mungitt. Mungitt is uneducated and was traumatized as a child; he has ended up the diametric opposite of Lemming. He is racist and homophobic, airing his anxieties in public. In the end he kills a man, probably intentionally. He is not a sympathetic character, but, once the story of his parents' murder/suicide is explained, it is also difficult to blame him for his ignorance. Greenberg does not make Mungitt an evil character, just one who is unable to behave well. He may be a victim of circumstances, but he is so lacking in the attributes that make Lemming admirable that his collapse is not even a moral issue.

The character who represents evil in the play is Davey Battle. Like Lemming, he is a star player, and he is Lemming's best friend, a fact that is told to the audience several times. Battle has all of the attributes that should make him sympathetic, but in the play's climax, he turns out to be missing what might be the most important element of all: empathy for Darren Lemming. He finds that he cannot tolerate the fact that Lemming is gay, which leads to an argument that Mungitt overhears, which results in Battle's death. Audiences can register how sad it is that a man has been killed over a simple misunderstanding, but in the play's larger moral sense, Battle's death is not a misunderstanding at all: his opposition to Lemming earns him his just reward. As a character, Davey Battle loses audience support because of his own intolerance, which turns out to be a more serious, punishable offense than Mungitt's ignorance or even Lemming's rage against Mungitt.

The main character of Take Me Out does not behave admirably. He is proud and arrogant to such an extent that he preys on the weak-minded Mungitt's fear of male intimacy, and he turns against fans and teammates who want to sympathize with him. Still, he is a sympathetic, even sweet character in the final scene. The play is crafted to keep audiences connected to Lemming, to take them as far as they can go with a fictional character whose behavior would probably be found unacceptable in real life.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on Take Me Out, in Drama for Students, Thomson Gale, 2007.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• The Changing Room, by British novelist and playwright David Storey, won the New York Critics' Best Play of the Year Award for 1972. The play, drawn from Storey's own experiences, takes place in the clubhouse of a rugby team. It examines the competitive nature of sports and the camaraderie that exists among teammates and was a precursor to Take Me Out in its use of onstage male nudity. First published in 1971 by Jonathan Cape, it is available in David Storey Plays: The Changing Room / Cromwell / Life Class, published by Methuen in 1996.
• Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair (1992) is an amusing novel about a very successful second baseman whose life starts unraveling when he finds that he is falling in love with the team's shortstop. When the men are caught kissing, they are banned from baseball for life.
• Glenn Burke was an African American center fielder, credited with being the player to invent the high five. He was also the first player in Major League Baseball history to go public about being a homosexual, a few years after his retirement. His autobiography, Out at Home: The Glenn Burke Story (1995), was published posthumously by Excel Publishing. It details the difficulties that Burke faced with drug addiction, a stint in San Quentin, and living with the AIDS virus, which eventually killed him.
• When a revival of Greenberg's 1997 Three Days of Rain opened in 2006, media attention focused on actress Julia Roberts, who was making her Broadway debut. But the play illustrates Greenberg's versatility, centering on three characters in the 1990s who cope with their own lives and the resurgence of their father's cryptic journal: in act 2, the same actors play their parents, in the 1960s. The play is available from Grove Press, in a 1999 edition that also includes Greenberg's The American Plan, The Author's Voice, and Hurrah at Last.