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Exit Interview

Jesse Tyler Ferguson Tips His Cap to ‘Take Me Out’

The actor, who won a Tony Award for playing a baseball star’s business manager in the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, called the role the most personal of his career.

Jesse Tyler Ferguson is walking up stairs while holding a life-size cutout of the actor Jesse Williams, who is dressed as his professional baseball-playing character in the play “Take Me Out.” The stairwell is all white, except for a red sign over a window that reads “fire escape.”
That’s a wrap: Jesse Tyler Ferguson absconding with a life-size cutout of his co-star Jesse Williams’s character in “Take Me Out” at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

By Sarah Bahr

At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater on Sunday night, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, standing in front of the black outline of a baseball stadium silhouetted against a pink, orange and yellow sky, closed his eyes, inhaling deeply as the lights went dark.

“Right before that moment, I was like, ‘If I say these last words, it’s really over,’” Ferguson said later, after returning to his fifth-floor dressing room after his final performance in the Tony Award-winning revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, “Take Me Out.” “And that hit me hard. I was just trying to hold it together.”

The sold-out show capped a 15-week return by Ferguson to the role that won him a Tony Award last spring, for best featured actor in a play.

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The curtain call on Sunday evening at the final performance of “Take Me Out.”Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times
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Ferguson played Mason Marzac, a business manager for a player portrayed by Jesse Williams.Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

“It’s definitely the most personal role of my career,” said Ferguson, 47, who played Mason Marzac, a fanboy business manager for a player (Jesse Williams) who comes out as gay. “It’s a role that meant something to me before I started learning it myself.”

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