Once again, of course, this review is taken from the Mountain Xpress, without their knowledge or consent, and we hope they don't mind.
--BG
Scapegoat hits a home run
Take Me Out parks local theater collective in the majors
by Cecil Bothwell in Vol. 13 / Iss. 40 on 05/02/2007
Going into the 2007 season, Director Taryn Strauss had loaded the bases, having previously coached the Scapegoat Theatre Collective productions of Everything in the Garden, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and The Exonerated. Now, like any pinch hitter worth the name, she has blasted one over the fence. The company’s current production of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out is superb.
The play scooped up a Tony Award for Greenberg—a good starter for any acting team, but the scale of the drama had to pose a directorial challenge. Eleven male actors on the bench, cast in 14 roles and scenes that ran from bar-room intimacy to group nudity in a locker-room shower offered plenty of opportunities to drop the ball. At the end of the action, the players, the 18-member crew, producer Lauren Alleman and Strauss deserved the roar of the crowd and the extended standing ovation accorded them on opening night.
OK. Enough with the baseball metaphors. For all the fun—and the play is oft-times hilarious—Take Me Out is also a deadly serious examination of homophobia, racism and personal responsibility. The story is that of a major-league star who comes out of the closet in the middle of a winning season. More importantly, it’s an exploration of the reaction of his teammates and coach, his business manager and friends. The casual, even slightly homoerotic behavior of sports players in jock straps is cast in a new light. The fact that the gay player is black adds another layer of tension, with racism tossed into the uneasy mix.
As the producers have accurately explained, “This show explores what happens when America’s favorite pastime becomes a true reflection of our country’s diversity, and how this affects the boys who are faced with that all important question, ‘Which team do you bat for?’”
Jason Williams shines as business manager Mason—adroitly funny, and sweetly gay. Liam Smith brings a quiet, goofy charm to his portrayal of Jason, lifting a supporting role to the heights. And Darren Marshall, perhaps type-cast as team coach, delivers in three roles with a stunning dynamic emotional range. The casting is excellent throughout, and Anna Tillman deserves high marks for her imaginative and convincing set design.
Scapegoat’s mission is to create “exceptional, transformative theatre,” and they are rapidly establishing a reputation as Asheville’s cutting-edge troupe. It’s easy enough to be political and artsy, and to expect that the choice of hot-topic plays would suffice to make a mark. The troupe far exceeds expectations, again. Extending its reach from proselytizing to practicality, Scapegoat also uses its productions as fund-raisers. Take Me Out is a benefit for I-RISE, a GLBTQ nonprofit that aims to be a forum for communication and education and provide a safe venue for socialization and entertainment for the other-than-straight community.
A hint for I-RISE: You don’t need to worry about the entertainment. A hint for everyone: You don’t need to be other-than-straight to love this play, but there is some strong language and one pair of naked buttocks.
Applause. Applause. Applause.
04 May 2007
Take Me Out
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The first sentence of Scapegoat Theatre Collective’s mission statement says that they are “dedicated to creating exceptional, transformative theatre,” but there is no indication as to what, in their opinion, makes theatre exceptional or transformative. In my experience, what Scapegoat does is fill an important niche, that of providing a creative, community event which draws focus and funds to a local non-profit that benefits a specific marginalized or under-served segment of society. In the case of Take Me Out, the Richard Greenberg play running at the Asheville Arts Center, the focus is on bigotry—sometimes racism but mostly homophobia, and the non-profit is I-RISE, a newly forming community center for Asheville’s GLBTQ community. Scapegoat admirably fulfills the part of their mission that has to do with “theatre in a community-based model” and “being a collaborative force for change in our community, and to merry making.” It seems to have great success following through on the goal of raising “money and awareness” for groups like I-RISE. I commend them. I wish more theatres were invested in the communities of which they are a part, and offered more plays that not only entertain, but challenge audience members to work towards a better future.
That said, to enlighten without entertaining can be as dangerous as the other way around, and I think a play like Take Me Out is finally too massive an undertaking to be truly effective, exceptional, or transformative to the average audience member when performed in a “community” model. I recognize that this will not be true for everyone, and clearly working on the play was an affirming, even life-changing undertaking for those involved, and I do not mean to negate the value and power of that. It’s just that, for me, the limitations of Scapegoat Theatre Collective and the compromises of this production kept me from appreciating the true value and power of the script, and the many strengths of the company ultimately could not compensate for the reduced power of the play itself.
Take Me Out is a play about homophobia, certainly, but at its heart, I think, it is a play about men. Specifically, it is a play about baseball players and how their peculiar privileges of manhood are shattered by speaking the unspeakable words, “I’m gay.” Just as Jackie Robinson endured terrible slurs when he became the first black major leaguer 60 years ago, so Darren Lemming (also black—well, half black) in the play becomes the first major leaguer to come out of the closet during his career, indeed at the height of it, and suffers mightily. His best friend on the team, Kippy Sunderstrom (the affable Matt Shepard) supports him, as do a few others, but the revelation throws into disarray the carefully constructed masculinity and sexuality that has outlets on a ball team that are much more intimate than in almost any other aspect of American male life. For the team, the result is a mid-season slump and a new pitcher brought up from the minors, who proves to be both an asset and a liability.
The play is famous for its nude locker room and shower scenes, and I think it is there that, typically, the most powerful visual images of men together emerge. Scapegoat has chosen to obscure the nudity, which is understandable, given the extremely intimate nature of the venue and the scope of the production, but I think that to do so also obscures something of the heart of the play. Our presumed squeamishness, contrasted with the ease with which the ballplayers share their nakedness, and how that ease turns subtly (and then graphically) into something else, is at the very heart of the play’s acute exploration of male sexuality. Towels and frosted glass just don’t carry the same punch.
Much else about the play worked to a certain extent, but left me ultimately unsatisfied. The set, for example, was attractive and functional, but used very literally, which didn’t help the show: the small dugout and bleachers upstage were used for one scene each, and while those two scenes worked well on those set pieces, the rest of the time the actors seemed rather cramped, and I wondered why the set pieces were taking up potential acting space. The sound design, when utilized, was effective, but the speaker behind my head clicked annoyingly throughout the evening, and I could discern no pattern as to when music would or would not play under a scene change. And when it didn’t (and sometimes even when it did), I caught myself counting the seconds of darkness, curious as to whether this scene change could possibly take as long as the last – I got as high as 26 seconds, which is long for any scene change, and well nigh inexcusable when the set does not actually change at all, as this one didn’t, or when the script cries out for pacing as quick as a double play (ok, there’s my baseball simile, done), as this one does. The play actually “started” before the curtain speech, with the players coming out on stage and going through warm up routines, which could be a neat idea, but which here said only that they all played baseball together, which of course we already knew. If they had had more room on stage to spread out, it might have helped. If they had an air-tight routine that impressed upon us their military-like dedication to improving their bodies, it would might helped. If they had done 100 push ups and sit ups, instead of 10 or 25 it might have helped. In short, it would have helped us to see these guys as ball players, as professionals whose lives are built around the balance of individual perfection and team playing. Instead, it told us just that they were a ball team, which is not a bad thing, just not a very useful one.
The casting, true to Scapegoat’s mission, is indeed exceptional for Asheville, in that the director, Taryn Strauss, managed to assemble the largest and most diverse cast seen in Asheville in as long as I can remember. That she was still unable to deliver quite the racial diversity called for by the script is a drawback, if an understandable one for a community theatre in this town, and her decision to cast non-actors in many of the roles written for blacks, Asians, and Latinos, was perhaps an over-indulgence in creativity and community building, unless “exceptional” really does just mean “something no one else is doing,” although in some cases it paid off. And certainly, one would prefer to see a ball team composed of really buff guys in their 20s and 30s, but even if the team assembled here resembles the scruffy Pirates more than, say, the Yankees, the guys did at least almost certainly hit the gym a few times to get ready for the shower scenes, and that is a good thing. They all managed to be unselfconscious, which itself can be an achievement, and a vital one for this show.
Several actors stood out as noteworthy, including Darren Marshall in two small roles, and Jason Williams as Mason Marzac, a gay accountant who comes to admire Darren Lemming not only for coming out but for his ball playing as well. In fact, this character’s journey (and the actors ability to infuse life into him) actually threaten to overshadow the role of protagonist, presumably held by Darren Lemming. The character did come across as older than the actor, although I’m not sure why, and I would love to see Mr Williams tackle the role again when he is 40. And I have to mention Gilberto Orozco, whose character speaks only in Spanish, and who (like several in the cast) has never acted before. He did not have a lot to do, but whenever he was onstage, he was invested in what was going on around him, listening or just being there with his whole self, and when he spoke (although I did not understand his language) I thought he was really talking to people. It was a great little moment that you only get from community theatre, and that I really appreciated.
I am not familiar enough with the play to know for sure whether the second intermission is usually treated as a “Seventh Inning Stretch,” but I strongly suspect that it is not:c I was quite surprised that a major and terrible event onstage would be followed by a community sing along of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” In all honesty, the said event onstage did not elicit in me the emotions that it was surely designed to do, so the silly song was not a huge shock. But I think this is precisely the problem: this production was interested in entertaining (or serving or whatever) the community to the detriment of the play itself. I should have been appalled that the song would follow the tragedy, or at least felt boldly alienated, in the Brechtian sense of the word. Instead, I found myself just part of a group of people who all happened to be watching the same guys on stage doing a play. Which I suppose was maybe the goal all along: to just get together and watch some guys do a play.
I guess what I’m suggesting is that while I was frustrated by the serious artistic compromises made at every level, the production was nonetheless a success as a community building exercise, a chance for some people to try out their acting chops and learn something about theatre, and (hopefully) as a fundraiser for an important community resource. Did I want more? Yes. Does that really matter? Probably not.
In my estimation Mason Marzac is the protagonist, though that's probably not clear to the audience until his big monologue. But one way of looking at the play is that Marzac is the progagonist who, being more stereotypically gay, is left out of what is quintessentially american, i.e., the perview of straight men, i.e., baseball. That he comes to love and understand baseball better than those who play it and that therefore baseball ultimately embraces him, as a fan even more than if he were a player, is what makes the play so touching I think. He is the outsider who understands the mainstream from the inside out and becomes its conscience through the twin power of metaphor and love. In this sense it's a play about how homophobia is going out of fashion, and gayness is a powerful lense through which to see straight culture.
I don't think it's a play about "men". I think it's a play about difference. "Men" are the kind of the unified field on which all the differences are played out. Having said that, it doesn't have much to do with women, does it? I love this play, but Greenberg betrays his generation here. There has yet to be a major gay male playwright who is not finally a sexist in that sense.
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