In June 2002, I reviewed Angels in America by Tony Kushner. It was an incomplete work, but even then, I was doubtful that reading the entire play would have helped much. The core of my complaint then was that a play, once stripped of its staging, acoustics, and the manifestation of character, particularly by a good actor, cannot stand alone. What you end up with is a lifeless, dreadful skeleton. I compared reading the text of Angels to be the same as reading the score of the Shostakovich Eleventh Symphony; it’s not the way the composer intended for me to enjoy the piece.
So when I learned that Take Me Out was a play, I was skeptical. However, there was one significant difference. Unlike Angels, I had already seen Take Me Out before reading it. And I had seen it only a few months before reading it. Nevertheless, the reading of this play was a totally different experience. I loved it.
The book took me 96 minutes to read, and that was at Planet Fitness where I’m easily distracted, so it may have taken all of an hour had I been able to focus.
The play is about a fictional baseball team. Baseball is more or less a metaphor here for America itself. The play is mostly narrated by Kippy Sunderstrom, a player on the team who’s quite smart but spends a lot of time trying not to show that he’s uncomfortable with his best friend, Darren Lemming, who’s just announced at a press conference that he’s gay. Darren is a troubling main character that you might feel the need to apologize for not liking all that much. He’s too haughty to realize that closer pitcher Shane Mungitt and he share at least one thing in common: the inability to foresee the effects of their spoken words. Shane, surprisingly, turns out to be one of the most intriguing characters in the play. He certainly does not come across as evil. He’s more of a victim of a horrendous childhood, and you feel for him.
Make no mistake, though, the play belongs to Mason Marzac, the accountant who discovers and rapidly devours baseball. It is he that draws the clearest line between baseball and the American way. He steals every scene and is the only one who can blow away the smoldering aftermath of some of the more potent scenes. Mason’s character is so well written that I actually found myself thinking about baseball. It’s still not my favorite sport, but I get some of the symbolism. I wonder how much of Greenberg himself is written into Mason.
At the book club discussion, our group facilitator was troubled by the paucity of stage direction given in the play. He directs plays for a living and therefore reads many of them every year. He said that he can usually visualize the sets as he’s reading a play. He said that he was unable to even guess the sets for this play. I considered this a positive, because I’m not watching a play. I’ve only been given the dialog. This time, the dialog stands on its own.
I recommend this book, but only if you will not be able to attend the play. The play has a great deal of full frontal male nudity, which is always a bonus, but here, it isn’t gratuitous, and it isn’t a gimmick. It’s all integral to the whole gay discomfort theme, and it works well. Not that I had to look far to praise its use!