The sound of the hit thwacks out from the stage. From the back of the auditorium comes the thud of the catch. Bulbs flash between the scoreboards; fluorescent strips light up. A crowd roars; a band celebrates; an audience exults in a rich and far-reaching play.
Take Me Out plunges you into a baseball game, sticks you into the middle of the States, puts you in a highly-charged place. Richard Greenberg persuades even the least keen of games players - me - that baseball could be an obsession, and that a match might be packed with meanings. He has found a terrific director in Joe Mantello.
This inexplicit though frank (full-frontal nudity in the showers) play presents itself as a coming-out drama. A star lets the press know he's gay. He's a perfect American specimen - gifted, handsome, insouciant, the son of a black woman and a white man; he's played with rangy poise by Daniel Sunjata. He gets vilified by one Neanderthal teammate (Frederick Weller becomes a factory of grunts and gapes); he's nimbly intellectualised by another (given the right fluent plausibility by Neal Huff); he's worshiped by a mousy financial adviser, whose anxiety is exquisitely projected in the twitches and grimaces of Denis O'Hare.
There's enough in this for a strong play. But, while supplying a spirited, funny portrait of homophobia, Greenberg goes further. He creates a tragedy with a gripping plot. And without dully resorting to heavy metaphor, he finds in baseball a way of exploring American lives. He uses it to show an internal male landscape. Baseball, one bien-pensant bloke bleats, means 'summer and lemonade and my Dad' - a pre-sexual pursuit disrupted by someone declaring their sexual preference. He uses it to demonstrate the provisional inclusiveness of American society. Enclosed in Scott Pask's unyielding locker-room design, a Japanese player explains he tries to become American by thinking of 'big flat stretches of nothing'. And in monitoring the burgeoning enthusiasm of that timid finance fellow, Greenberg casts light on the hunger for celebrities. 'Life' is so tiny, so daily, 'you take me out of it': a fan orchestrates his days with a new rhythm.
One measure of Greenberg's dramatic reach is his ability casually to evoke material most writers would feel they had to put centre-stage. Another is the audacious range of his vocabulary - from biblical and rolling to bald and blurting. It's a range that says something about America. Which helps to explain why the Donmar is the most alive place in London theatre this summer.
Greenberg has said he doesn't understand why 'playwrights are supposed to be good at the beginning of their career and then they begin to suck. Why should you get worse if you keep doing something?' Michael Frayn should listen. Frayn has said that he looks wistfully on the revival of his 1984 play Benefactors, feeling he can no longer write like that. His regret is misplaced. Benefactors is not as good a play as Copenhagen, written nearly 20 years later.
A middle-aged liberal couple - an architect and anthropologist, sweethearts since Cambridge, given to improving the world - take up with a neighbouring couple: she's hopeless (though not so hopeless that she can't see that 'we make them feel good'); he's a shit (and a journalist). Plans to transform a run-down urban area into high-rise heaven coincide with the transformation of marriages into misery.
There's no shortage of things being said: about the impossibility of wreaking change in the outside world, and the inevitability of change in human affairs - but too much, said rather than shown, sounds like a novel struggling to get out of a play. As a dramatist, Frayn's best suit is not naturalism but existential anxiety. This is apparent in Copenhagen, which, apparently so little concerned with conveying intimacy, and intent on scrutinising a hypothesis, is actually far more pressured by human feeling than Benefactors. As it is in his farces, in which hilarity sounds like desperation: Noises Off is still running at the Comedy - directed, as is Benefactors - by Jeremy Sams.
Who made a mistake in acceding to a design by Robert Jones which is as puzzling as it is ugly. Dark walls dwarf a Habitatish kitchen, with slabs that reach almost to the ceiling, greeted by a similar set descending from the roof. In between is a chink of sky. So: these are people trapped by their own intentions - but is the chink a sign of hope or an architectural error? Either way, the hugeness of the surroundings drains intimacy from the dialogue. It's a particular pity since the play's actors are skilled at the betraying small gesture. Emma Chambers suggests a lifetime of bungled office assignments when she twists her hair and does her Vicar of Dibley boggling-eye trick; Sylvestra Le Touzel bustles and beams with the right degree of wholesomeness; Aiden Gillett flummoxes himself immaculately; Neil Pearson, though seeming stunned by the under-explained nastiness of his character, casts, as he should, an effortless chill.
The bad you do while doing good is a topic in Mother Teresa Is Dead. Pithily argued and persuasively acted, Helen Edmundson's new play pits love against charity. It's serious-minded, but hard to believe. A young mother leaves her National Front husband and goes to India, where she thinks things will be simple and she'll be able to care more. (If they're really broke, why didn't he notice the withdrawals from the bank?) He follows her (no trouble from his employers?) and a tussle for her spirit ensues. In the most unexpected (and believable) twist in the script, a glamorous Indian charity worker, and suitor, proves dodgy.
Anthony Lamble's tawny and turquoise design is enticing. Harry Dillon is alluring, and Maxine Peake - blank faced, but shaken by tremors - arresting. John Marquez head-butts with fear and ferocity; Diana Quick is sad and gorgeous, like a languorous lioness.
But these people don't belong together. This play is like a series of talented audition speeches, in which you keep expecting someone to burst in advising everyone: 'Big Hug'. Which is pretty much what happens.
5 Take Me Out, Donmar, London WC2
5 Benefactors, Albery, London WC2
· Mother Teresa is Dead, Royal Court, London SW1
Three to see
Dirty Blonde, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (from Fri) - Claudia Shear's Broadway hit about Mae West previews.
Twelfth Night, Globe, London SE1 - The all-male production, with a transfixing Mark Rylance, that shows the Globe at its best.
The People Are Friendly, Royal Court, London SW1 -Buoyant black social comedy.
