Take Me Out, Donmar Warehouse, London

London

You can forget The Full Monty. If it's an extended view of male dangly bits you're after, then Take Me Out – the new play by Richard Greenberg – is just the show for you. Privates are frequently on parade in the locker-room and full-frontal shower scenes in this exploration of what happens when a baseball superstar, Darren Lemming – who, with his white father, black mother and matinee idol looks, is revered as a one-man emblem of racial harmony – suddenly elects to come out to the media as gay.

There aren't, I'd guess, all that many English theatre goers who could tell you the difference between a "flyball'' and a "mean ball'' or easily distinguish a "home plate'' from a "dug out''. London, therefore, seems a rather incongruous place to stage Joe Mantello's punchy, buttonholing premiere – particularly as Take Me Out is by no means a straightforward issue play about the difficulties of being openly gay in the culture of a major professional sport. It is also – which is much more difficult to put across to an English public – a giddy valentine to the game.

That the play sometimes feels not so much ambivalent about its subject matter as positively schizophrenic can be put down to the fact that its author, a gay intellectual type, has latterly become a born-again baseball freak. His surrogate in the piece and its most attractive character is Mason Marzac, Darren's new financial advisor. Creating a beautifully unforced comic rapport with the audience, Denis O'Hare, excellent in the part, shows you a clumsy, repressed, quietly camp mid-lifer who blossoms into a liberated baseball nut as a result of catching up with the career of his celebrity client. There's something both touchingly ludicrous and (thanks to O'Hare's performance) oddly infectious about his gabby rhapsodies on baseball as "the perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society''.

But if convert zeal has given Mason a new lease of life, the play shows how Darren makes the opposite journey into disillusionment with the game. When congratulated on the bravery of coming out, Darren declines the compliment. There's no courage where there's no risk, he reckons, and his supreme prowess renders him invulnerable. This is a strange claim, because the history of the sport tells a significantly different tale of major league stars who were sidelined and ruined on account of their sexuality or who, as in the recent case of Billy Bean, felt that they had to retire before they could be themselves. But then Darren, whose swagger, sarcasm and essential solitude are finely captured by Daniel Sunjata, scorns the idea of identifying with any community. In his own eyes, he's a god. Warmly informed that his announcement has made him seem more human, he testily jokes that this represents a "demotion''.

A more conventional play would wheel on a nemesis for Darren in the shape of a team member driven to destroy him because of being in denial about his own sexual orientation. But the young, newly recruited pitcher Shane Mungitt (Frederick Weller), a slow-witted hillbilly bigot, is merely a frightening moral simpleton. Nor is it our hero, but the star of a rival team – a sort of Tullus Aufidius to Darren's Coriolanus – who winds up as the fatality. If Mungitt's retardedness is, in one sense, a dramatic virtue, it is also evidence that Greenberg (who does not have David Mamet's natural ear for testosterone-charged male banter) tends, for his own convenience, to segregate Darren's uncomfortable colleagues into people who either sound stereotypically dim or artificially educated. Mantello's powerful cast blast through these problems, however; an equivalently impressive feat would be for an English company to sell a flawed, obsessive play about cricket to an off-Broadway audience.

To 3 August (020-7494 3487)