What would happen if one of America’s sports heroes came out of the closet? That’s the premise behind Richard Greenberg’s Tony Award-winning play “Take Me Out,” making its regional premiere next week at New Stage Collective. Darren Lemming is at the top of his game both personally and professionally when he calls a press conference to make his shocking admission. “Baseball is the dressing around the interpersonal conflicts between the characters, all of the racial, sexual and ‘men’ issues,” said Charlie Clark, who plays Mason Marzac, a business manager and accountant who is assigned to Lemming after the press conference. “He knows nothing about baseball, but becomes interested because of all the multiples of three in the game,” Clark said, “but he begins to understand why it is America’s pasttime.” Mason’s introduction to the game resonates with the 11 actors in the cast who had to learn some of the basics to create a credible team. “There are only a couple of us who have watched it or played it,” he said. “We did a lot of table work to go over all of the references that people who understand baseball will know.” The cast also took a field trip to batting cages so they could learn how to swing a bat, and it’s not unusual to see them warming up for rehearsals with a game of catch, Clark said. Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s artistic director Brian Isaac Phillips, who performed in NSC’s produciton of “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” last season, serves as guest director of “Take Me Out.” Joining Clark, NSC’s “dream team” cast includes Joshua Ryan (“The Full Monty”) and Kenneth Early (“Side Show”), Cincinnati Shakespeare Company’s Ensemble member Justin McCombs and Young Company members Alex Brooks, Billy Chace, and Derrick Ledbetter, Cincinnati theatre veteran Chris Kramer, and newcomers Kai Sato, Brook Allen Stetler, and S. Justin Terry.