INTERVIEW: Carl Lundstedt on his three-year baseball journey in ‘Take Me Out’
Photo: Take Me Out continues at the Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by Polk & Co. with permission.
When Carl Lundstedt first auditioned for the Second Stage Theater revival of Richard Greenberg’s acclaimed play Take Me Out, he didn’t have many expectations. The actor, who has appeared in The Joker film and TV’s Manifest, entered the audition room in fall 2019 with the casting director sitting across the way and taking notes. The process went surprisingly well, and Lundstedt was asked back for a second audition, this time with Greenberg, director Scott Ellis and Second Stage artistic director Carole Rothman in the room.
“Funny enough, I actually went in for the Jason Chenier part, the other dopey white guy in the cast, and I was called back for that part,” Lundstedt said in a recent phone interview. “And then in my final audition, Scott, our director, came up to me and said, ‘That was good. That was really, really good, but we’re having a lot of trouble casting this Toddy [Koovitz] character. Would you be able to learn it and come back in the room later today?’ I said, ‘Yes, absolutely,’ but I had another callback for something else later in the afternoon. So I only had an hour’s time to learn the scene and come right back in. So I went into the hallway, studied the lines as much as I could, and then came back in and let it rip. I guess they really liked what I did because I ended up getting the part later that day.”
Lundstedt, who has a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, was somewhat familiar with Greenberg’s play, which tells the story of Darren Lemming (Jesse Williams), the star center fielder for the Empires baseball team. At the beginning of the show, Lemming comes out as gay to his teammates and the public, and he faces prejudice in the locker room from some of his fellow teammates, including Lundstedt’s role of Toddy Koovitz. Also starring in the play, which continues through Feb. 5 at the Schoenfeld Theatre, are Brandon J. Dirden, Bill Heck, Michael Oberholtzer and Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who won a Tony Award for his performance as Mason Marzac. Most of the cast have been together for the show’s initial run at the Helen Hayes Theatre last theater season and this commercial run at the Schoenfeld.
“I was familiar with the play from acting school, but I hadn’t read it before I received the call to audition,” Lundstedt said. “I was familiar with the Shane and the Darren characters predominantly, but as far as Toddy, or even what the play was really about, I didn’t feel like I had too strong of an opinion just because I think one of the things that’s so wonderful about the play is you get into it thinking it’s one thing, and then it ends up being something completely different. So even after having read the material a number of times during our first rehearsal process, I still feel like I’m learning new things along every step of the process.”
The revival had a difficult journey to Broadway because of the disruptions caused by the global pandemic. The actors got in two or three weeks of rehearsal before COVID-19 shut down the theater world in 2020. Thankfully the team had Ellis at the helm.
“Scott Ellis is a wonderful director, a real actor’s director,” said Lundstedt, who is making his Broadway debut with Take Me Out. “For both rehearsal processes we had in 2020 and 2022, we did a lot of table reading, which is really nice because you get to read the play without judgment, without trying to create a performance too quickly, just to hear it, just to feel the beats. When you’re dealing with writing as good as Richard’s is, so much of that does the work for you. Some highlights of the rehearsals were we got to go to baseball camp way back in 2020 and work with baseball trainers in the Upper West Side, some basement facility that was really, really cool.”
At the baseball camp, the actors were put through drills and played short games of the beloved sport. Throughout this process, Lundstedt came to realize that he was a member of a quality team of actors, which is a credit to Ellis, who ensured each performer was perfectly positioned in their respective role.
“I know Scott has talked about making sure that people are quality people in the equation when casting a group, trying to cast a cohesive group that is going to get along together,” he said. “You never know for sure if that’s going to happen or not, but this group has been very cohesive from the very beginning. Now if you add in to that the fact that most of us have known each other for three years now, it makes a huge, huge difference. So when I’m on stage with Jesse or Tyler or whoever, there is this bond of time and hours clocked together. Even during COVID when we weren’t working together, there was a group chat, and we Zoomed a few times. And people were sending gifts to one another. So all of that really does lend itself to the material in the play about the fact that this is a group of guys who do spend all of their time together. They are soldiers, teammates, brothers, for better and for worse, and so having all that time with each other definitely has informed our chemistry on stage to be sure.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Take Me Out, featuring Carl Lundstedt, continues through Feb. 5 at the Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
