For the love of the game

10 April 2012

The American season at the Donmar finishes next month with the world premiere of Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out - dealing with that most all-American of pursuits, baseball. Or, more specifically, homosexuality and baseball.

As is the case with our Premiership footballers, there is no major league baseball player in the US who is openly gay. Greenberg's play centres on a superstar catcher who announces, at the height of his career, that he is homosexual. Director Joe Mantello, however, is reluctant to describe it as a coming out play.

'The outing of a baseball player isn't that interesting,' he says. 'The extent to which male identity is bound up in a relationship with sport, however, is.'

Baseball has a similar sentimentalised place in the US psyche to football in the British. 'Because kids play it from a very early age and it is passed through the generations, the game isn't just about physicality and athleticism but about the heart,' says Mantello. He, like Greenberg, came to the game late. 'The play for me is actually more about one man's adult love for the game than it is about homosexuality.'

One senses Mantello has fielded more questions on the play's subject than he might have otherwise if an outing campaign wasn't currently taking place in the New York press. Rumours have been circulating for weeks about the sexuality of an as-yet-unnamed major league catcher; rumours sufficiently poorly veiled to lead New York Mets superstar Mike Piazza to deny he is gay. Newspapers have qualified their interest, prurient or otherwise, with lengthy comment on whether baseball is ready for a homosexual star.

Mantello is nervous about expressing an opinion on whether institutionalised homophobia exists in baseball. 'It's a problem that could exist in any professional sport, given the conditions in which the men have to work,' he says. 'Homophobia will always be a problem when you've got packs of blokes.'

Mantello is no stranger to American plays which confront controversial social issues head on. Two years ago, he directed Neil LaBute's work, Bash, at the Almeida. Aseries of intercepting monologues, the play's subjects included infanticide and a gay rape. It was that experience which encouraged him to return to London to direct Take Me Out. 'English audiences are so much more receptive to new theatrical experiences than New York ones,' he says. 'In New York, audiences sit with their arms crossed. It's as though they are saying: "Prove it to me".'

London openness may be something to do with the British appetite for new American work and, of course, US stars. The West End, not just the Donmar, has been flush with plays from across the Pond recently: Tony Kushner's Homebody/ Kabul, Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth and Neil LaBute's latest, The Distance From Here, are just three examples. Is there a sense in New York that the American play is undergoing something of a renaissance? 'Ah, but we don't see it that way,' says Mantello. 'We think it about your theatre instead. New York is crazy for English theatre. Maybe it's an accent thing.'

Mantello hopes the fertile cultural exchange enjoyed by Broadway and the West End will ease the transatlantic crossing of Take Me Out, a play whose subject matter he is aware may seem alien to British audiences.

'Tell me,' he says, 'is baseball totally foreign to you?' Well, yes, but only in the same way football is to Americans. (Mantello was unaware of America's shock victory over Portugal in the World Cup qualifying rounds. 'We could have won,' he says, 'and no-one in America would know.') Swap the bat for some goalposts and you've got a virtual equivalent. Well, almost.

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