Take Out - A gay play first noted in Beaverhausen's September edition has made it to Broadway, and is garnering a new round of media attention from the Times ("dewy, delirious passion") and even the Wall Street Journal ("funny, smart and ... touching"). Perhaps surprisingly, both broadsheets are proclaiming the show's excellence. Apparently much of the crossover appeal comes from actor Denis O'Hare who plays an unusual role of observer to the play's central story -- the uproar that erupts when Darren Lemming, the star player of the New York Empires professional baseball team, comes out as gay. O'Hare's character, money manager Mason Marzac is

Darren's new business manager and unlikely ally, a nerdy, exuberant man who is a whiz at investments but a washout in the snobby precincts of the "gay community." In baseball, he finds a "perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society," a world in which "everyone is given exactly the same chance. And the opportunity to exercise that chance at his own pace." Where numbers have a quirky power. Where he finally can converse with cab drivers and his five brothers and wear a big, foam rubber finger. And where time is taken for the "home run trot," when "play is suspended for a celebration."

The NYT explains:

A lonely, emotionally constipated gay man whose life takes on meaning when he takes on Darren as a client, Mr. O'Hare's Mason becomes baseball's dream cheerleader. To see him bend and blossom before the mysteries of the game is a bit like watching Cary Grant, in his priggish mode, being thawed out by a madcap Katharine Hepburn in ''Bringing Up Baby.''

The Times notes that the play "has been advantageously shaved and streamlined from three acts to two." Luckily, it has retained its famous "host of good-looking guys standing around naked for the show's already notorious shower scenes." Given all the critical buzz, one wonders if this could be the first gay baseball story to make it in Hollywood, beating out the old odds-on favorite, Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair.