50 years in 50 weeks: 2004’s home runs – Bay Area Reporter, America’s highest circulation LGBT newspaper
You can’t fault us for our enthusiastic coverage of Richard Greenberg’s thought-provoking drama Take Me Out, about a gay baseball player’s decision to come out. Also, the play includes extensive male nudity in shower scenes.
First, I fortunately timed a visit back to New York City in 2003 with the play’s Broadway run, and wrote about it in my Sports Complex column in our October 23 issue, and wrote a subsequent Q&A with the playwright in our February 23, 2003 issue.
In our December 9, 2004 issue, theater writer Richard Dodds interviewed M.D. Walton, who starred in the touring production that ran at the Golden Gate Theatre. Dodds also interviewed Greenberg in the same issue.
And New Conservatory Theatre Center produced Take Me Out in May-June 2007.
But let’s return to this year’s 2004 focus. Actor M.D. Walton (who, like the character, is biracial, but unlike the fictional baseball star, he’s not gay) was quoted as having ‘broken the ice’ of nudity in the first day of rehearsal. “It was liberating, in a sense.”
Of the onstage showers, playwright Greenberg told Dodds, “One of the things about the nudity is that’s it’s not erotic. It’s so casual and the context is so professional. It doesn’t have a big dangerous charge.”
Nevertheless, its multiple productions drew fans of theater, baseball and the human male form; quite a home run.
Enjoy more vintage issues on archive.org/details/bayareareporter
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