By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 24, 2005; C01

Baseball's been very, very good to Washington so far this spring, and it looks as if "Take Me Out" could have some of the same salutary effect. A lyrical valentine to the national pastime encased in the turbulent story of a gay superstar, the play has been staged to virtual perfection by Studio Theatre, which is fielding a team that can be described only as, well, fabulous.

Richard Greenberg's locker room comedy-drama is an impassioned portrait of the game, but its target audience isn't the ESPN crowd per se. Although it takes place inside the ballpark, the play tackles such non-sporting issues as race-baiting and gender politics and what it means to be a friend, a man, a civilized human being. To get all of the humor, a basic comprehension of baseball surely helps. An appreciation of the richness of a literate playwright's language, however, helps more.

"Take Me Out" secured the Tony for best play during an 11-month stay on Broadway. Director Kirk Jackson's production, tailored immaculately to the intimate contours of Studio's Mead Theatre, shows why it deserved the prize. Four smashing performances, by Tug Coker, M.D. Walton, Jake Suffian and Rick Foucheux, anchor this exploration of the trials and terrors of male bonding. With the support of a strong ensemble and a crackerjack squad of designers, it goes on the scorecard as one of the most valuable productions of the season.

The prolific Greenberg, chronicler of yuppie angst in plays like "Three Days of Rain" and "Eastern Standard," came to a love of baseball as an adult; his paean to the sport is akin to an emigre's fervor for his adopted country. For this reason, perhaps, his characters are created in his own image: They're poets on and off the field, speaking in rivers of ravishing words. It is, however, out of the realm of likelihood that a major league player would use a verb like "fleer" (to laugh derisively, the dictionary says).

This is, then, an idiosyncratic major league of the mind, set in a locker room where towels snap less often than brilliant zingers. Interestingly, the play's most pathetic character is the one with the most pitiful vocabulary.

And given that it's a locker room, working showers and all, there is -- you should know walking in -- a healthy amount of strutting in the altogether. This wouldn't be worth mentioning if the nudity were a momentary event. But it's a sustained and crucial aspect of the play, one that deals with an incendiary mix of athletics, machismo and homoeroticism. All the exposure has an ironic facet, too, for what Greenberg is dramatizing here says a lot about the way men cover up.

The story of "Take Me Out" is refracted through the experiences of several men. They talk both directly to us and to one another, and the play seesaws between interludes of therapeutic confession and sandlot-style confrontation. Some of what transpires verges on contrivance, particularly in the last third of the piece, when an errant pitch becomes fodder for the criminal justice system. Even so, Greenberg's characters never lose their charm. The play bobs on a reservoir of insight and witty repartee.

Much of the talk revolves around the tale's hero, Darren Lemming, star of the Empires, whose pinstriped uniforms peg them as stand-ins for the Yankees. As played by Walton, Lemming is a handsome and regal cock-of-the-walk. He is also gay, which he announces to the media. The declaration is a bit passive-aggressive, as Lemming knows it will throw the team into turmoil. Torn between their ingrown biases -- Lemming is also biracial -- and the pressure from society to be more sensitive and tolerant, the players and manager are forced onto a treacherous playing field of their star's devising.

Greenberg supplies two primary narrators, Lemming's best friend on the team, Kippy Sunderstrom (Coker) and, even more memorably, his new financial adviser, Mason Marzac (Foucheux). Marzac is a nebbishy gay man who worships the arrogant Lemming and, through him, baseball itself. The character is an inspired invention, a megaphone for the playwright's own obsession with the sport. As Marzac, Foucheux is nothing short of sublime. His first-act monologue, in which the actor expounds on the thesis that baseball is superior in design to democracy, is a sparkling moment, unfolding like a perfect sports column. Foucheux majestically manages the task of balancing social ineptitude with intellectual grace.

Suffian is also terrific as a backwoods caveman/relief pitcher who doesn't know that bigoted terminology about gays and blacks and Latinos is not a smart thing to spew before the cameras. (There are intimations of the notorious, career-damaging interview that former major leaguer John Rocker once gave.) Tom Quinn, as the Empires' crusty manager, and Ikuma Isaac, playing a Japanese member of the pitching squad who speaks no English, also deliver incisive portrayals.

Jackson and his set designer, Daniel Conway, give us a keen sense of the ballpark. Embedded in the stage floor is an approximation of a baseball diamond, with illuminated first- and third-base lines. Blond-wood lockers slide in from the wings. Suspended in the back wall are rows of stadium lights. Michael Lincoln's lighting and Reggie Ray's costumes are both effective, and Jackson himself does a grand job of choreographing a game in d.

As for Neil McFadden's sound design: The software was on the fritz for a good portion of the Sunday matinee. When it suddenly revived, the stadium noise added a welcome dash of realism.

Even without it, though, "Take Me Out" can speak in its own mellifluous voice. Greenberg is pushing a lot of hot buttons in this play. What flames hottest is something that words ultimately fail: an irrational, unrequited love for a game.

Take Me Out, by Richard Greenberg. Directed by Kirk Jackson. With Matthew Deiss, Joel Reuben Ganz, Jeorge Bennett Watson, Cesar A. Guadamuz, Anthony Gallagher. Approximately 2 hours 20 minutes. Through June 26 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Call 202-332-3300 or visit http://www.studiotheatre.org/ .