So Long, Medical Scrubs. Jesse Williams Is Ready to Play Ball.
nytimes.comJesse Williams will be the first tell you — certainly, he was the first to tell me — that he has no formal theater training and little practice.
There’s an Edward Albee play in the hazy past and a one-act opposite Zosia Mamet. That’s pretty much it. When I met him, on a recent weekday afternoon at Spring Place, a ritzy club and co-working space in TriBeCa, he joked that he was probably the least experienced theater actor I had ever interviewed.
But on April 4, the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out” will open at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater with Williams, a familiar TV presence from his decade-plus run on “Grey’s Anatomy.” Which means that he is learning on the job: what “upstage” means, whether to hold for a laugh, how to use his whole body in a scene and not just the torso on up, as is the norm on television. “I’m not even wearing pants in half of those scenes,” he said of his time on “Grey’s.” (I think he was kidding?) In “Take Me Out,” which is set in the mid-1990s, Williams, 40, plays Darren Lemming, a superstar baseball player who comes out as gay.
It’s a play about race, class, sexuality, sport and living a life in the public eye. Williams’s Darren stands — in batter’s crouch — at the intersection of these competing themes. “I’m here to just learn and get my butt kicked,” he said, using a stronger word than “butt.” Williams grew up in Chicago, the eldest child of a white mother, a potter, and a Black father, a factory worker who later became a teacher.
