‘Out’ gets at-bat on Broadway

The question is one familiar to every baseball fan as the season ends, when the final out in the final inning has been called, when there are no more games to watch, even between teams that have defeated one’s own.

What’ll we do till spring?

Playwright Richard Greenberg, a midlife convert to baseball -- and, in particular, the New York Yankees -- admits he worries about it. As does Mason Marzac, the character in Greenberg’s play “Take Me Out” who bears a resemblance to his creator. Baseball has hit both of them “belatedly and forcefully,” Greenberg says.

Mason, a nerdy gay accountant, discovers the game when he takes on the financial affairs of one of its star players. Soon he’s rooting passionately for the Yankees-like Empires. “He carries the history of my falling in love with the game,” the playwright says. And worrying about the empty stretch between seasons.

The analogy ends here, because Denis O’Hare, the actor who’s playing Mason, is not a baseball fan. He admits this a little reluctantly -- after all, he did study method acting at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. -- and says he tried to get involved, staying up into the wee hours to watch games on the YES network.

“But I don’t like any sports for the very simple reason that I can’t take the tension. It makes me sick to my stomach,” O’Hare said. “I always pick the wrong person, the wrong team. As soon as I started watching the Yankees, they fell apart. So I’d rather not watch at all.”

His game of choice is bridge.

When he first encountered Mason, in a reading of the play (Greenberg says O’Hare is the first actor he thought to cast), O’Hare had no empathy whatsoever. “There was just something at the core of the character that I didn’t understand.” Even after he got the part, “It took a while before things dropped in.”

By now, O’Hare and Mason have been together for quite a while: “Take Me Out,” a play about a baseball team that has to deal with its star (Daniel Sunjata) dramatically emerging from the closet, opened in the summer of 2002 at the Donmar Warehouse in London (where the theater program included a glossary of baseball terms to help those unenlightened Brits). The production moved to the Joseph Papp Public Theater in the fall and recently transferred to Broadway, where it opens Thursday.

Off-season baseball pangs

The play’s ongoing success has eased Greenberg’s off-season dilemma. “I’ve had a more moderate sense of loss than in other years,” he says. He was in Southern California last year, working on another play (“not one word in it about baseball”) when the Yankees lost in the first round of the playoffs. The playwright admits he briefly transferred his allegiance to the Anaheim Angels (who won the World Series). “I was happy for them, but not as happy as I could have been,” he says.

One thing that the playwright, the actor and the character have in common is their sexual orientation, although in Mason’s case, his is incidental to the plot. The character came along, says Greenberg -- who insists he had no interest in writing “an issue play” -- because with baseball as a background, he needed an “enchanted” figure to balance the ones who were becoming “disenchanted” with the way things were turning out.

Mason complains that he has an outsider relationship with the gay community as well as major league sports, and, O’Hare says, “I myself have a very contentious relationship in my head with the gay community -- which probably has to do with my own level of confidence and self-acceptance.” There’s the matter of his Irish Catholic family back in Michigan. Somewhat obliquely but lightly he concludes the subject: “Some of my best friends are gay. My lover is gay.” (He was with the director Derek Anson Jones until Jones’ death in 2000; now he lives with a designer.)

When the play was in rehearsals, director Joe Mantello invited Keith Hernandez, the former Met first baseman, to discuss the world of baseball with the cast. “I asked him if he had an accountant, but not much else because I’m not playing a ballplayer,” O’Hare says. “But the other guys asked him stuff about the habits, life in the dugout, what life is like on the road, about superstitions, the culture.”

Hernandez also helped Greenberg authenticate the script, in particular a scene in which a ballplayer from another team (Kevin Carroll) visits the Empires’ dugout on a mission. Hernandez told them that in real-life baseball this would never happen, so Greenberg inserted some lines about how “although this violated a sacred rule, it was absolutely necessary.”

For Greenberg -- and baseball lovers in general -- spring is just around the corner. And there’s no need to worry about O’Hare not having enough to occupy his spare moments. “I’ve got a couple of weird hobbies,” he said, including building collage boxes in the style of artist Joseph Cornell. It’s been going on for years, and by now he’s got a huge workshop in his Brooklyn home with saws, sanders and routers.

It’s a tradition that before opening night members of a production give each other gifts reminiscent of their show. Don’t tell anyone, but the “Take Me Out” crew will be getting Cornell boxes.