‘Take Me Out’ is a hit -- and a save

Richard GREENBERG’S “Take Me Out,” about a gay baseball player’s coming out, tops American Theatre magazine’s annual list of the plays to be produced most often by America’s resident theaters in the current season.

With 12 scheduled productions (including the one now at the Geffen Playhouse and another next year at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego), “Take Me Out” pulled ahead of “Anna in the Tropics,” “Crowns” and “The Drawer Boy,” each of which has 11 productions on tap.

As “Take Me Out” journeys farther into the U.S. hinterland, however, the question arises how far it will get with its scenes of several teammates on a Major League Baseball team showering together onstage. The actors are nude. Will this really play in, say, Charlotte?

Actually, the Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte completed the North Carolina premiere of the play earlier this month, but only after modifying the shower scenes. The actors were naked, but their genitals were obscured by towels and opaque glass doors on the shower stalls.

Last summer, one of the local county commissioners, Bill James, asked the county’s Arts & Science Council -- which this year provided the theater with $32,000 of its $279,000 budget -- to examine the company’s plans to produce “Take Me Out.” “Community standards in the South and in Charlotte are significantly more conservative than what sells in New York, San Francisco or L.A.,” said James, a veteran of a 1996 crusade against a Charlotte production of “Angels in America.”

Dan Shoemaker, executive artistic director of the theater, says he willingly met with agency officials, who gave the production an OK after he described plans for the nude scenes. “We didn’t want to have to defend ourselves against homophobic bigots throwing rocks in our windows,” Shoemaker says. He added that Greenberg’s text doesn’t specify how the shower scenes are to be staged.

Although James accepted the agency’s decision, he continued to oppose the production, saying, “It’s going to be up to the public to decide if [the play] offends them. Memo to liberals: We don’t tolerate homosexuality.”

But Shoemaker says the production was “very well-received.” There were no rocks through the windows. In a mixed but encouraging review, the Charlotte Observer critic wrote that the “working clubhouse shower deals neatly with the frontal-nudity problem.”