Take Me Out, Donmar Warehouse, London <br></br>Benefactors, Albery, London <br></br>Mother Teresa Is Dead, Royal Court Upstairs, London <br></br>As You Like It, Open Air, Regent's Park, London

Baseball? It's all a Greek tragedy to me

There I was thinking, with back-to-back football and tennis on telly, who needs a new play about a fictional baseball hero called Darren? Now I'm eating my words, having seen Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out – the last in the Donmar's American season – performed by a terrific US cast.

Darren is a star batter of mixed race who has one flaw. He has always been adored and therefore believes he's invincible. When Darren announces he is gay at a press conference, he's completely cool about it. But his dimmer and less progressive team-mates and fans prove phobic and depressingly bigoted. Back in the clubhouse, united multicultural fronts disintegrate with fatal ramifications.

Take Me Out is bigger and bolder than Greenberg's Donmar debut, Three Days of Rain. It's a gripping contemporary variation on Greek tragic principles which simultaneously conveys the writer's passion for his national sport and wittily mocks big league players with tiny brains. More importantly, Greenberg uses baseball to analyse the confused values of modern America. Joe Mantello's production, with jetting showers and flaring stadium lights is tense, humorous and humane. Skilfully portraying Darren's arrogance but also the character's inherent appeal, Daniel Sunjata is a name to watch.

Whether your partner or friends are on your side is a worry in Benefactors, though the main analogy here is not sport but architecture. In Michael Frayn's mid-1980's memory play about "progressive collapse" – now enjoying its first West End revival – Jane (Sylvestra Le Touzel) recalls how middle-class life seemed cosy and amusing in 1960's London; the prospect of change appeared full of promise then too.

Slipping into flashback, we find her fast-rising husband David (Aden Gillett), enthusiastically designing local authority housing – to replace working-class terraces – for a challengingly small site. Simultaneously, he's home-building less literally in his own street, getting his journalist pal, Colin (Neil Pearson), to move in next door. Soon they and their wives and kids are like one big family. Colin's mousey spouse, Sheila (Emma Chambers), virtually lives in Jane's kitchen.

But when Jane breezily determines to build up Sheila's self-confidence by making her David's secretary, the jealous Colin views that as marriage-wrecking. All their lives start falling apart as Colin then undermines David's career by leading an anti-tower block campaign.

This play is not quite as clever as Copenhagen, Frayn's more recent study of ex-allies, unreliability and nuclear fission. Perhaps Robert Jones's set design – with concrete walls towering above a homely pine table – also makes this piece feel a tad distant and bald in its contrasts. Yet Frayn's writing has actually weathered the years impressively and you gradually realise the overlap between benefaction and destructiveness is subtly investigated here.

Though a few speeches were rushed on press night, Jeremy Sams' cast are richly ambiguous in their displays of affection – brief hugs suggesting innocent fondness, insincere condescension or deeper attractions. Le Touzel spikes cheery generosity with aggression and Chambers brilliantly makes you fear that Sheila is a menacingly invasive weed. Not instantly arresting, but a play that lingers unsettlingly in the mind.

More dubious do-gooders turn up in Mother Teresa Is Dead. Jane has abandoned her life as wife and mother in Kilburn to head for the subcontinent – strikingly echoing Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul. Her bewildered and often bullish husband, Mark, finds her working at a children's shelter outside Madras and staying with Frances, a genteel ex-pat. Jane is obsessed with the Third World's needs, and quite possibly aid worker Srinivas, too (who is Frances's lover). A tug-of-war ensues over Jane (who might be verging on a mental breakdown). An Oxford-educated local, Srinivas scorns Mark as an insular racist but may be driven by selfish desires himself.

This four-hander, directed by Simon Usher, can feel schematic, and occasionally exchanges come perilously close to the corny. But Helen Edmundson takes risks to yoke sociological issues to intense emotions as she questions the limits of our charitable urges. John Marquez's Mark, though monotonously brash at first, becomes surprisingly tender and, as Frances, Diana Quick's constrained grief is poignant. However, as Jane, Maxine Peake has so many rambling, angst-ridden speeches, she seems a weak pivot.

Running away from court to Arden in As You Like It, Rosalind restarts her life in exile as a shepherd boy, wooing her beloved Orlando incognito while loyal cousin Celia plays the pastoral gooseberry. Hovering between city and country, Regent's Park is a perfect setting for Shakespeare's comic romance.

In Rachel Kavanaugh's production, the final marriage vows lack ceremonious magic, there are some duff performances, and Benedict Cumberbatch's Orlando hardly explores his bisexual inclinations – maybe because (as Darren says of baseball) the Open Air Theatre aims to be "family appropriate". That said, this production amusingly sends-up cosmopolitan snobbishness. Rebecca Johnson's pert Rosalind transmogrifies into a startlingly convincing chap and newcomer Caitlin Mottram captures Celia's wounded feelings and bouncy resilience. An enjoyable excursion for anyone in a holiday humour.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Take Me Out': Donmar, London WC2 (020 7369 1732), to 3 Aug; 'Benefactors': Albery, London WC2 (020 7369 1740), to 28 Sept; 'Mother Teresa Is Dead': Royal Court, London SW1 (020 7565 5000), to 13 July; 'As You Like It': Open Air, London NW1 (020 7486 2431), to 7 Sept