THEATER REVIEW; Love Affair With Baseball And a Lot of Big Ideas

Looking for a natural high in the down, down days of late winter? Well, it is said that eating chocolate can simulate the heady sensations aroused by the first phases of being in love. But if you're allergic to the stuff or on a diet, you may want to consider an unlikely but potent alternative that goes by the name of Denis O'Hare.

Mr. O'Hare, an actor whose presence automatically illuminates any stage, is shining these days with the gloom-dispelling wattage that comes when a first-rate actor meets a role he was born to play. The role, in this case, is of a man falling -- no, make that sky-diving -- in love. And when this fellow, a socially challenged money manager named Mason Marzac, talks about baseball in Richard Greenberg's ''Take Me Out,'' it's impossible not to share in his trembling, all-transforming ecstasy.

Baseball? That's right. In ''Take Me Out,'' which opened last night on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theater after a sold-out run at the Joseph Papp Public Theater last fall, Mr. Greenberg brings his gymnastic verbal skills to bear on the subject of the all-American pastime. And when Mr. O'Hare takes center stage as the conduit of Mr. Greenberg's feelings about the sport, this comic drama emanates a dewy, delirious passion not unlike that in the opera being performed a few blocks away, Puccini's ''Bohème.''

There is much more to ''Take Me Out'' than Mr. O'Hare, although that may not be your impression when you leave the theater. The play, which has been advantageously shaved and streamlined from three acts to two for its Broadway incarnation, has an involved and ambitious central plot in which Mr. O'Hare's Mason figures only as an onlooker.

That's the story of Darren Lemming (Daniel Sunjata), a god among baseball players and the star of a team called the Empires, who sets off a complicated chain of ultimately tragic events when he publicly announces that he is gay. This allows Mr. Greenberg to consider -- in language that gives joltingly bombastic dimensions to locker room humor -- big, big subjects like sexual and racial prejudice, moral responsibility, public versus personal identities and the inability of people to ever truly know one another.

Whew! That's a roster that would have overloaded even Sophocles. And in trying to give theatrical life to each theme, Mr. Greenberg winds up sacrificing fully developed characters and credible plotting to Ideas with a capital I. Despite a vivid ensemble of actors who embody a lively spectrum of bat wielders, ''Take Me Out'' ultimately fails by the dizzyingly high standards it sets for itself as a metaphysical mystery play.

But the director, Joe Mantello, has sensibly chosen to emphasize the play's less ponderous aspects. These include zippy (if improbably polysyllabic) dialogue; a hypnotic narrative that does much to disguise the potholes in the plot and is appealingly delivered by Neal Huff as a shortstop with the worldview of a novelist; and a host of good-looking guys standing around naked for the show's already notorious shower scenes.

These moments are meant to illustrate the sexual self-consciousness that descends on the team members after Darren declares his homosexuality. But to tell the truth, the shower scenes don't really feel essential, and they wind up confusing the discomfort of the players with the more general sense of discomfort that can accompany full frontal nudity in a mainstream play.

This, of course, is what sent a lot of people to the Public Theater last fall (bearing binoculars, in some cases). Whether such nudity will be a similar draw on Broadway, where it usually takes a naked celebrity (e.g., Kathleen Turner) to pack 'em in, remains to be seen.

The designer, Scott Pask, and Mr. Mantello have done a fine job in scaling up both production and performances to match the more expansive scale of a Broadway house. As a Derek Jeter-like figure of racially mixed parentage and class-crossing charisma, Mr. Sunjata exudes the relaxed confidence of a man who takes his divinity for granted. That you see little evidence of the change that Darren says he has undergone at the play's end is less Mr. Sunjata's fault than Mr. Greenberg's.

The production also benefits from Mr. Huff's spontaneous delivery of commentary that can be quite a mouthful, even with the deletion of phrases from the earlier version like ''male sodality.'' And Frederick Weller as a cretinous pitcher, Kevin Carroll as Darren's pious best friend, James Yaegashi as a pitcher imported from Japan and Joe Lisi as the team's avuncular manager all have warm moments in which they transcend the artificial dimensions of their characters.

But ultimately, it's Mr. O'Hare who owns the evening. 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.''

And what an enchanting and enchanted take on baseball Mr. Greenberg has created for Mason, both passionately personal and lyrically analytical. It's a sensibility that is so smart, raw and sincere all at once that you may find tears in your eyes in the first act as Mason describes the raptures of ''the home-run trot.''

There is also a moment in the second act that turns baseball into something like grand opera. The white light of night games floods the stage as the ensemble members act out an evocative baseball ballet, and Mr. O'Hare waxes into hallelujah-like paeans to the game. ''Maybe I've had a ridiculous life,'' he says, ''but this is one of its best nights.''

The scene is one of the most stirring on Broadway right now. It's an unconditional, all-American epiphany that, in these days of fretful ambivalence, is something to cherish.

TAKE ME OUT

By Richard Greenberg; directed by Joe Mantello; set by Scott Pask; costumes by Jess Goldstein; lighting by Kevin Adams; sound by Janet Kalas; production stage manager, William Joseph Barnes; production management, Gene O'Donovan; associate director, Trip Cullman; general management, Stuart Thompson Productions/James Triner; executive producers, Greg Holland and Pilar DeMann. The Donmar Warehouse and the Public Theater production presented by Carole Shorenstein Hays and Frederick DeMann. At the Walter Kerr Theater, 219 West 48th Street, Manhattan.

WITH: Neal Huff (Kippy Sunderstrom), Daniel Sunjata (Darren Lemming), Frederick Weller (Shane Mungitt), Joe Lisi (Skipper/William R. Danziger), Robert M. Jiménez (Martinez/Policeman), Gene Gabriel (Rodriguez/Policeman), Kohl Sudduth (Jason Chenier), David Eigenberg (Toddy Koovitz), Kevin Carroll (Davey Battle), Denis O'Hare (Mason Marzac) and James Yaegashi (Takeshi Kawabata).