I’ve said it more than once, and now Strawberry Theatre Workshop’s production of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out is making me say it again: Mediocre art tells on itself.

Greenberg’s 2002 play, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, announces its own critique up front. In his opening monologue, Kippy Sunderstrom, a character who doubles as the narrator and the baseball team’s intellectual, tries to describe the “mess” of the story he’s about to tell. He starts and stops a couple times before eventually launching into it. This move is supposed to foreshadow the plot’s rich complexity and to highlight the essential unknowability of inciting incidents, but it really just foreshadows… a mess.

The play’s problem, under Greg Carter’s direction, is a split premise. Act I focuses on the ripple effects of a star baseball player, Darren Lemming, who casually comes out as gay at a press conference. Darren’s admission triggers a crisis of masculinity within his teammates, who all react in their own strange homophobic ways, except for Kippy, whose support for Darren becomes overbearing. Fans think Darren’s sexuality politicizes a sacred game and ruins their childhood baseball memories. As corporate sponsorship offers pour in, Darren remains antagonistically unfazed by the whole thing. Being gay isn’t his problem, nor is it anything special for him, so he brushes off the blowback and the support.

At this point, I’m thinking I’m going to get a story about the gay guy who challenges a homophobic institution, an exploration of denial and internalized oppression, some drama about the complications of inclusion, maybe a little critique on the idea that society isn’t homophobic anymore, etc., all of which sounds great. But then, in Act II, a stranger comes to town.

The team owner hires a racist, illiterate, golden-armed pitcher named Shane Mungitt, played by Craig Peterson, who couldn’t hold his faux hick accent and who seemed stiff onstage. Suddenly, the focus of the play shifts to “What are we gonna do about Shane, a clichéd metaphor for the most obvious forms of racism and homophobia in America?”

That’s a fine question worth exploring, if the monthly Cletus safaris published in the New York Times haven’t been doing it for you, and I’m always hungry for sympathetic villains. But the shift in focus makes Act I feel irrelevant, and I started to get the sense that Greenberg and Carter were more excited merely to present a lot of titillating questions about race, gender, class, and sexuality rather than say anything about them. Instead of fleshing out the ideas in Act I or Act II, the production makes a big pile, has some fun with plot, and ultimately offers up a larger claim about baseball (and theater) both embodying the inevitability of loss and eternal return. Those are fine themes and all, too, but it ends up feeling watery.

The quality of the acting didn’t do the production any favors, either, which was surprising for a Strawshop show. However, Jon Lutyens had me cracking up in his role as Darren's money manager. Lamar Legend turned in a magnetic performance as Darren Lemming, which hit its peak in the second half during a powerful exchange between his character and Davey Battle (played by Nicholas Japaul Bernard), who is Darren’s homophobic confidant from a rival team. And Trick Danneker played Kippy with warmth and the perfect amount of neurotic energy. But everyone else was having a bad night.

There was a lot of naked dong onstage, though. So there’s that. Happy Pride Month.