Jesse Williams Brings His Passion For Justice To Broadway In ‘Take Me Out’

It’s a busy night on the blocks of Broadway. At Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, it is 8 o’clock, and the house lights are dimming. Audience conversations are going from murmurs to silence, and theatergoers are settling for the 90-minute revival of Take Me Out, which features Broadway newcomer Jesse Williams.

While America has great familiarity with Williams, his residency on Broadway represents a new chapter in his career and a departure from his weekly place in American life as a medical doctor on Shonda Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy. While the piercing green eyes of Dr. Jackson Avery have left Grey’s Anatomy viewers heartbroken, his pointed delivery and award-winning ability to capture their attention span are not lost in the lights of Broadway.

Meeting each performance with a self-described humility, reverence, and a pinch of fear from being a lifelong student, Williams believes breaking into live theater for him was about remaining vibrant and alive.

“If I’m not learning and growing, then I’m dying,” said Williams, 41. “I wanted to go out there and try something new and risky.”

As part of a new trend of Black straight actors stepping up to play roles that explore African-American queer characters and storylines, Williams’ role as Darren Lemming, a fictional Gay Black baseball star, has received critical acclaim. Achieving a coveted Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play, Williams and his castmates regularly sell out the theater. Take Me Out has just extended its Broadway run until February 5, 2023.

Created by playwright Richard Greenberg in 2002, Take Me Out explores the themes of racism, leveling up economically, homophobia, and masculinity in professional sports.

“The lyrical sharpness of Richard Greenberg’s writing in this play is consistently playing with comedy and tragedy simultaneously,” said Williams, who graduated from Temple University with a double major in Film and Media Arts and African-American Studies.

Greenberg’s formula brought forth the duality of tragedy and humor while exposing audiences to struggles faced by LBGTQIA athletes who are immersed in the heterosexual masculinity that can only be found in locker rooms, clubhouses, and the sometimes rigid world of professional sports.

Taking part in Take Me Out has not only tested Williams, but added his name to a growing list of Black actors breaking the sexual orientation boundary, including J. Alphonse Nicholson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Blair Underwood and Omari Hardwick.

“The ability to have humor despite great pain and to commit great pain through humor is always something interesting to parse as a performer,” Williams said. “It requires you to keep the pace up while leaving room for the audience to absorb it, but not simmer too long, because we have more [of a] story to tell.”

Take Me Out is full of storytelling. Whether it be tense moments from team members digesting the sexuality of Jesse’s character Darren or managing the fallout from the dueling battles of racism and homophobia, Williams believes it all to be a depiction of the lived experience of far too many Black men, whether they identify as LGBTQIA or heterosexual.

The role comes at a time when the nation is focused on Black LGBTQIA professional athletes and the inequities that face them, as highlighted in the story of WNBA star Brittney Griner.

“There has been a duality in every character I’ve ever played,” Williams exclaimed. “All of them are categorized and labeled in certain ways to ascend the ranks in sports or medical school.”

Williams started his ascent to TV stardom in 2009 on Grey’s Anatomy. He gained notoriety as Dr. Jackson Avery, a medical resident from a wealthy bi-racial family. Within a year, Williams was named a series regular.

As an actor and recurring director on the long-running medical drama, Williams first charted a path to acting and television as an upper-level student at Moses Brown School. His participation in a brawl led to a mandatory film and photography class that exposed him to the Dark Room and opened his eyes to all the potential that existed in the world of creative arts.

“It would become therapy to me, telling stories through a visual frame, illustrating life and having the ability to compose a visual narrative, that is what led me into cinematography,” Williams said.

Long before joining Grey’s Anatomy and taking on minor roles in Law & Order and ABC’s Greek, Williams was a high school English and American Studies teacher in Philadelphia Public Schools.

With pervasive underfunding in Black, Brown, and low-income public schools throughout the country, per the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, Williams’ time in the classroom gave him a front-row seat to the inequities that plague Black America. As a board member of the Advancement Project–a civil rights organization that utilizes innovative tools and strategies to achieve high-impact policy change on racial and justice issues–Williams used his classroom experience to listen, learn and sit with local organizers and activists in the fight for racial equity.

“Jesse Williams wants to listen, he wants to learn, and then he wants to act,” said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project.

Browne Dianis and Williams crossed paths at the Obama White House. She believes that, while always committed to racial justice and civil rights work, Williams doubled down following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“Being on the ground in Ferguson radicalized him,” she said. “In showing up and standing with a community that was being harmed, he was able to meet with organizers, know folks on the ground, and go toe-to-toe with police without fear of retribution. Jesse was like Harry [Belfonte] on a journey to do the right thing no matter what.”

Williams’ deep involvement with the Advancement Project is part of his larger quest of ensuring access to self-determination for Black America and working-class families.

“It is essential for Black folks and working folks to have our hands on as many of the sustainable levers of power and influence in our own life,” Williams exclaimed.

As a board member for Scholly–a web-based application that connects students to scholarships and grant opportunities–Williams has worked with Christopher Gray, Scholly’s founder, to increase access to higher education and lower the barriers standing in the way of people obtaining power.

“Jesse is one of those creatives that pick characters and roles that are an extension of himself,” Gray said. “He consistently portrays characters that embody his values and there is a real intersection between his career and the work he chooses outside of acting.”

Williams agreed.

“I started in this business late enough in life and developed enough as a person that it [Hollywood] has to adjust to what I care about, not me changing to try to book a job,” Williams said.

In 2016, Williams won the BET Humanitarian Award. In his acceptance speech, he shed light on the plight facing Black America and how whiteness makes that plight more difficult.

Williams said, “there has been no war that we have not fought and died on the frontlines of; there’s been no job we haven’t done, there’s no tax they haven’t levied against us.”

He continued, “We’ve paid all of them, but freedom is always conditional here.”

Back on Broadway, Williams’ character Darren, a mixed-race center fielder for the fictional Empires Major League Baseball team, explores that conditionality every night.

“When you are on stage, you’re shooting the master and close-up at the same time, all the time,” said Williams, who continues to be a frequent guest star on Grey’s Anatomy since leaving in May 2021. “That means you have physical and communicative with the audience, who can see your fingers and feet and not just your face.”

The play exposes audiences to harsh language, frontal nudity, and provocative race and sexuality-laced conversations. In his role, Williams utilizes his work to uplift the demands for justice and respect. He said, “there is no culture in history that has ever gotten respect, collectively, that has not demanded it for themselves.”

As Williams works on his next chapter, which begins with Take Me Out on Broadway, he hopes to continue acting, pursuing new opportunities in writing, storytelling, directing, and bringing his personal story to light in future projects.

“Storytelling is the way we experience, and story and narrative humanity are the lens through which the vast majority of us experience reality and experience the world,” Williams said. “They give us a sense of attainable goals of a lived and shared experience and feeling seen and considered and not alone.”

In October 2022, Hulu announced that Williams would be joining the cast of Only Murders in the Building for its third season.