TAKE ME OUT

The Walter Kerr Theatre, 219 W. 48th St. (212) 239-6200.

QUITE the smartest part of Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out” is the tri- ple-play resonance of its title, with those can- nily apt suggestions of baseball, homosexuality and sudden death.

The rest of the play, which opened last night at the Walter Kerr Theatre after playing London’s Donmar Warehouse and off-Broadway’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, isn’t quite so clever, although it certainly has its moments of fun and wit.

An enormously admired and charismatic biracial ballplayer, Darren Lemming (Daniel Sunjata) gives a press conference to announce he’s gay. Likely? Not very. Mike Piazza summoned the press to announce that he wasn’t gay, but that’s a different matter.

Still, Lemming’s revelation doesn’t seem to have too much of an effect on his career or his status with the team or the fans – until some incredibly hayseed relief pitcher, Shane Mungitt (Frederick Weller), brought up from the minors to save the champion team’s fast-fading fortunes, spouts off on a radio talk show:

“I don’t mind the colored people – the gooks an’ the spics an’ the coons an’ like that. But every night t’have t’take a shower with a faggot!”

Even a John Rocker doesn’t rock that far. Meanwhile, poor Greenberg is still only a third of the way through his play. What to do?

He has a Japanese pitcher throw a near-perfect game, only to blow it, then have the relief guy, just off the suspension list, step in and hurl a literal killer-diller.

Okay, it could happen. But what does it mean? What does it tell us?

What, for that matter, does Greenberg, a late convert to baseball, have to tell us about the game?

He has one character – Lemming’s gay money-handler, Mason Marzac (Denis O’Hare), who makes the late Paul Lynde seem like Tarzan on Viagra – flash all this philosophical guff about “baseball being a perfect metaphor for hope in a democratic society,” etc.

Just take me out to the ballgame, buster!

Admittedly, such thoughts are presented with irony and attitude – even more irony and attitude now than earlier, off-Broadway, yet they still stick in one’s craw.

Joe Mantello’s staging – featuring two nude shower scenes that are unnecessary to anything but the box office – looked much better at the Public Theater than here on Broadway.

That said, the play is dazzlingly well-acted, which makes it seem a whole lot better, and shorter, than it really is.

As Darren Lemming, Sunjata looks like a star in the making, and O’Hare, Weller and Neal Huff (as Lemming’s philosophical commentator of a teammate) are terrific.

But not even classy acting and sassy dialogue can help a play that’s buck-naked at its core.