Home > Love! Valour! Compassion! Summary & Study Guide

Love! Valour! Compassion! | Introduction

Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! opened Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1994 and then transferred to Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1995. This was in the middle of the 1990s—a decade in which the playwright garnered an impressive four Tony Awards. The others included Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1994), Best Play for Master Class (1996), and Best Book of a Musical for Ragtime (1998). He also scored a theatrical ‘‘hat trick’’ in 1996 when three of his productions ran simultaneously on Broadway: Kiss of the Spider Woman, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and Master Class.

Love! Valour! Compassion! was hailed by many critics as McNally at the top of his form. The play centers on eight gay men who vacation together at an upstate New York country home for three summertime holiday weekends. Gregory, the host of the gatherings, is a successful but aging choreographer trying to complete what may be his last major work. Bobby, his blind and much younger live-in boyfriend loves him but is still discovering who he is and what he wants from the world. John is a cynical, mean-spirited, failed English playwright, relegated to working as a rehearsal pianist for Gregory’s company. His twin brother, James, a costumer for the National Theatre of Great Britain, is as kind and compassionate as John is angry and alienated. He is also dying of AIDS. Ramon is John’s current boyfriend. He is a young, handsome, and talented Puerto Rican dancer just beginning his career. He is also filled with confidence, brimming with sexuality, and very attracted to Bobby. Perry and Arthur are the group’s ‘‘role models.’’ Although they constantly bicker and feud, the lawyer and accountant have been together for fourteen years and are often the force of stability in an otherwise chaotic world. Finally, there is Buzz, the highly charged and hilarious costumer for Gregory’s company who is obsessed with musical theatre, always ready with a sarcastic one-liner, and is usually the life of the party. Like James, he is HIV-positive, and his high jinks often mask his troubled spirit.

Readers of Love! Valour! Compassion! will find a formula that has worked well for McNally in some of his other successes: a group of characters gathered together for a weekend of talking, laughing, and exploring the boundaries of their relationships and some of life’s more profound and difficult questions. In his introduction to the published play, McNally reveals, ‘‘I wanted to write about what it’s like to be a gay man at this particular moment in our history. I think I wanted to tell my friends how much they’ve meant to me. I think I wanted to tell everyone else who we are when they aren’t around.’’

Mostly comic, the play manages to include elements of seriousness and even tragedy. It employs some unconventional theatrical techniques. The stage is mostly bare, the scenery imagined, and each of the characters takes turns narrating the action, alternately speaking directly to the audience and to one another. It is, as the 1997 film version of the play was billed, an outrageous mix of the The Big Chill and The Bird Cage.

Love! Valour! Compassion! Summary

Act 1
The action of the play begins on Memorial Day weekend at the lakeside vacation home of Gregory Mitchell in upstate New York. Gregory, a successful Broadway choreographer, has invited a group of his friends to visit for the long holiday weekend. We are given a glimpse of most of them right away as they are gathered around Gregory’s piano singing ‘‘Beautiful Dreamer.’’ There is Bobby Brahms, Gregory’s own blind, live-in boyfriend; Buzz Hauser, a comic, sarcastic lover of Broadway musicals who is HIV-positive and afraid of what the future holds for him; Perry Sellars and Arthur Pape, a lawyer and accountant in a long-term, monogamous relationship; John Jeckyll, a mean-spirited English pianist; and his boyfriend, Ramon Fornos, a handsome, young Puerto Rican dancer.

Though each of these men becomes involved with one or more stories, or ‘‘plotlines,’’ in the play, Love! Valour! Compassion! is more about its characters and the themes they explore than it is about essential elements of plot. The construction of the play has a cinematic quality—short scenes shift fluidly from one into another, often juxtaposing the actions and conversations of the characters to provide additional layers of meaning. Time moves back and forth, while characters take turns interacting in scenes and turning to the audience to narrate portions of the play’s events. The early scenes of the play mainly establish the identities of the characters and introduce some of the play’s more prominent themes—variations on love and friendship, trust and betrayal, forgiveness and redemption, and the resilience of the human spirit.

Following the opening scene around the piano, the action shifts to late at night. Most of the men are in their bedrooms sleeping, but Bobby has gone down to the kitchen for a late snack when he encounters Ramon. They have a brief, passionate, and physical sexual encounter in the kitchen that ends with a bottle of milk crashing to the floor and breaking, waking Arthur who comes down to investigate. Ramon disappears, back to the bedroom he shares with John, but it is obvious to Arthur what has happened. He helps Bobby clean up, and they discuss Bobby’s act of unfaithfulness to Gregory. Arthur admits that he once cheated on Perry and recommends that Bobby keep it to himself, forget about it, and move on. ‘‘I told him,’’ he warns Bobby, ‘‘and it’s never been the same. It’s terrific, but it’s not the same.’’

Bobby goes back to bed with Gregory, and Arthur rejoins Perry while the scene changes to the previous day when everyone arrived. Their reappearances now, one at a time, are an opportunity to get to know them in revealing ‘‘snapshots’’ of their personalities. John is downstairs spying in Gregory’s journal when Buzz appears. Far from feeling guilty at being caught in the act, John reads aloud from the journal and encourages Buzz to join him. They discuss the status of their relationships. John has been seeing Ramon for three weeks, and Buzz recently broke up with yet another boyfriend who found him too ‘‘intense.’’ True to his description, Buzz turns to the audience with a campy rave about his love for musicals, his hatred of AIDS, and his longing for a man to call his own.

They are joined by Gregory and Ramon who have been swimming in Gregory’s lake. Ramon is Puerto Rican, young, handsome, virile, less experienced than the other men but clearly capable of holding his own. He is an odd match for John, who is older, more cynical, and far less humorous. Their differences are obvious in the constant disagreements they have with each other. Ramon expresses his admiration for Gregory (‘‘Mr. Mitchell’’ he calls him) and his phenomenal career, and the men compliment him on the success of his own small dance company, which has recently gained critical acclaim and moved from a small space in the East Village to the Opera House at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Next to arrive are Perry, Arthur, and Bobby, who come in from the city together by car. While driving, they discuss Bobby’s blindness, which he has had since birth and does not let deter him or define who he is or how he interacts with people, apart from getting to know them by touching their facial features rather than simply shaking hands. They also reflect on the relationship Perry and Arthur share. After fourteen years together, they act as ‘‘role models’’ for the other couples, though they too have had their share of bumpy roads. Now they are the sort of couple who finish each other’s sentences and know each other’s likes, dislikes, and responses intimately.

As the men all unpack, settle in, have dinner, and gather together around Gregory’s house, some of the play’s other complications are revealed. John has a twin brother, James, who is suffering from advanced symptoms of AIDS and who wants to come for a visit. A phone call from James upsets him terribly and causes him to be anxious and angry for the rest of the evening. Perry and John were once lovers. They now detest one another and can hardly be in the same room together without quarrelling. Gregory has committed all of... » Complete Love! Valour! Compassion! Summary