Team delivers in clutch

Team loyalties aside, the best baseball games are the closest. The less lopsided the score, the more thrilling the sport.

Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,� set in the world of major league baseball, isn’t as lopsided as it appears at first glance. Our initial sympathies are shaken and stirred.

As with most good plays -- as opposed to most good games -- there is no scoreboard except in each theatergoer’s brain. But Greenberg does just about everything he can to keep the play exciting.

The plot approaches the line of implausibility with its climactic chain of events. But it doesn’t quite cross that line -- as with a memorable game, the action may seem unlikely in retrospect, but didn’t we just see it happen with our own eyes?

That we feel that way is in large part a tribute to a crackerjack cast at the Brentwood Theatre under the direction of Randall Arney. The play opens the Geffen Playhouse’s new season in its temporary Brentwood quarters while the Geffen undergoes renovations.

The title “Take Me Out� has cleverly layered meanings. The plot focuses on a superstar player who, very early in the play, tells America that he’s gay. So we quickly realize that the title refers to coming out of the closet, as well as to the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.� Only late in the play does a third meaning become clear -- and it shouldn’t be revealed in advance. The play works so well, however, that a fourth meaning hovers in the background -- Greenberg takes us out of our own routines into the rarefied world of a championship team facing a very unusual crisis.

That crisis isn’t triggered entirely by the announcement of Darren Lemming (Terrell Tilford) that he’s gay. His teammates take that news in stride, more or less. The fans don’t seem especially disturbed either, although they are represented only in one brief scene by one man (Carmen Argenziano, who doubles as the team’s manager).

But then there’s Shane Mungitt (Jeremy Sisto), who has just been brought up from the minors as a relief pitcher and helps turn around the team’s fortunes. From a dirt-poor background and a colossally unhappy family, Shane hasn’t learned how to say much of anything, let alone how to cloak his feelings in politically correct language in public. Unfortunately for the characters but fortunately for the audience, he’s placed in front of a microphone just before intermission.

Two characters speak directly to the audience as well as to the other characters. One of them is straight -- Kippy Sunderstrom (Jeffrey Nordling), Darren’s best friend on the team. Kippy is exceedingly well educated, witty and a would-be mediator. His narration begins the play.

Greenberg then introduces Mason Marzac (Jeffrey Hutchinson) as a relief narrator. He’s a gay, nerdy money manager who’s assigned to handle Darren’s millions and becomes swept up in admiration for his client and for baseball, which had never previously interested him.

Mason’s ruminations on the larger meanings of baseball are so masterfully written that there is a danger that his part can loom too large, as was the case in New York in the wake of the Tony Award that Denis O’Hare won for playing the role. O’Hare was even placed in the foreground of ads for that production, although his character has little to do with the action. It’s too bad that Mason gets the play’s last line and that it’s a sentimental cliche.

Here, outside the hyped-up Broadway atmosphere, Hutchinson is charming but not overpowering in the role, and the production seems better balanced.

The focus is properly on Tilford’s shiny, arrogant Adonis and Nordling’s Kippy. Tilford makes palpable Darren’s descent into feelings of doubt and guilt. And audience surrogate Nordling, caught between the adversaries, lucidly navigates Kippy’s conflicting feelings.

Sisto is a revelation as the rough, gruff Shane, whose many prejudices don’t completely nullify his interpretation of the events at the play’s climax, no matter how inarticulately he states his case.

Morocco Omari plays Darren’s longtime friend, now the star player on a less successful team. Omari and Tilford make their current distance from each other much more obvious than their previous bond.

Ryun Yu, as a Japanese player with no English skills, nevertheless paints a picture of the loneliness of the long-distance pitcher. But a couple of Latino players are too under-written to move beyond stereotypes.

Anyone who can’t accept stage nudity should stay away. The shower scenes are graphic, but the bare skin isn’t gratuitous in a play that addresses the subject of homophobia among men in a locker room.

The locker room and other sites are little more than suggested in Eric Larson’s set design, but a bank of stadium lights and Karl Fredrik Lundeberg’s recorded fanfares help convey the play’s identification of baseball as a quasi-religious rite.

*

‘Take Me Out’

Where: Brentwood Theatre, Veterans Administration grounds, 11301 Wilshire Blvd., Brentwood

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 4 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Oct. 24

Price: $45 to $55

Contact: (310) 208-5454

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Terrell Tilford...Darren Lemming

Jeffrey Nordling...Kippy Sunderstrom

Jeremy Sisto...Shane Mungitt

Jeffrey Hutchinson...Mason Marzac

Morocco Omari...Davey Battle

Ryun Yu...Takeshi Kawabata

Ian Barford...Toddy Koovitz

Bryce Johnson...Jason Chenier

Carmen Argenziano...Skipper/

William R. Danziger

Carlos Albert...Martinez/Guard

Byron Quiros...Rodriguez

By Richard Greenberg. Directed by Randall Arney. Set by Eric Larson.

Lighting by Daniel Ionazzi. Costumes by Christina Haatainen Jones. Music and sound by Karl Fredrik Lundeberg. Production stage manager Lisa J. Snodgrass.