Love! Valour! Compassion!
[In the following favorable review, Kaufman examines the themes, characters, and plot development in Love! Valour! Compassion!]
"You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." Though it was supposed to be sardonic, this tragic line from The Boys in the Band has acquired a grim, unintended meaning long after it was uttered by a gay character in 1968, a year before the Stonewall uprising. Generally perceived as the first "homosexual play"—as opposed to merely being a play about homosexuals—Mart Crowley's drama was steeped in a self-loathing that stereotyped homosexuality and branded all homosexuals at the time. But we've come a long way since then, both on stage and off. In terms of the theater, however, never has our progress seemed more assured or more richly proclaimed than it does today, with the arrival of Terrence McNally's new play, Love! Valour! Compassion!, which in some respects resembles a Boys in the Band twenty-five years later, and may become as much of a landmark. Even as important and recent a play as Tony Kushner's Angels in America is still riddled with self-loathing issues for homosexuals, which begins to explain why it has been more of a success with straight audiences than with gay. And the more current Blade to the Heat, by Oliver Mayer, which opened at the Joseph Papp Public Theater within a week of Love! Valour! Compassion!, focuses on closeted homosexuality and gay-baiting as well, in the professional boxing world of 1959.
Beginning with the fact that both Love! Valour! Compassion! and The Boys in the Band have eight gay characters, there are enough similarities to suggest McNally is paying homage. But beyond any tribute we might detect, his new offering functions more like a public exorcism, a stunning assertion that the self-hatred which ostensibly accompanied homosexuality has been buried once and for all.
For three decades, McNally has been one of our most reliable playwrights. From It's Only a Play to The Lisbon Traviata and Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, he could be counted on time and again to supply another sturdy play, practically guaranteed to amuse and move us in equal parts. Consistency need not imply greatness—think of Neil Simon—but this new venture achieves it.
Artistically speaking, Love! Valour! Compassion! owes very little to McNally's last overtly gay play, The Lisbon Traviata, first produced in 1985. But it follows very naturally from his most recent plays, Lips Together, Teeth Apart and A Perfect Ganesh. Both of those dared, as McNally does now, to ask profound questions about the meaning of life, and they also employed unconventional theatrical techniques whenever, for instance, their characters interrupted the exposition to lapse into internal reveries or stream-of-consciousness musings. While Ganesh sent two elderly women on a spiritual mission to India and Lips Together situated two married couples in a beach house, each of those plays trafficked in gay issues, albeit in relatively discreet ways. (In the first, one of the characters is trying to forgive herself for not accepting her son's homosexuality before he was murdered in a gay-bashing incident. In the second, the posh beach house has been inherited by the sister of a gay man who died of AIDS, and it is surrounded by gay characters offstage on both sides.)
Given his long-term association with the Manhattan Theatre Club, it seemed that McNally was deliberately writing gay plays from a straight perspective in order to better reach and educate its subscription audience, composed predominantly of elderly middle-class couples. If that were the case, he apparently feels they've learned enough by now to immerse them, finally, in a thoroughly homosexual milieu. In bringing together an octet of gay characters in a country house over three successive holiday weekends (Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day), Love! Valour! Compassion! features a lot of camping it up, bitchy humor and extensive full frontal nudity.
Yet, like the best gay fiction in the post-Stonewall era, this play is more about characters who happen to be gay than it is about gay characters. Though they are all men, they're engrossed in familiar McNally themes that have less to do with gender than with the human condition: finding intimacy or sustaining loving relationships in the midst of fear and loss. This particular group is so vividly drawn it transcends anything that we might find to say about the characters individually, even as the play that contains them transcends anything McNally has produced before.
What's difficult to convey in any discussion of Love! Valour! Compassion! is the grace with which the characters become people as their stories unfold. It's not only that they're vividly rendered, but that they're revealed gradually, in a layered and richly textured fashion. Evoking at times Thornton Wilder, at others the interior monologues of Eugene O'Neill, McNally has derived a unique voice that allows each of his characters to shift in and out of commenting on the action they are simultaneously a part of. They take turns, in other words, being part-time narrators even as they're playing themselves. They also share their inner feelings at certain moments, and eventually tell us what's to become of them long after the play is over. Though this all might sound awkward, it's accomplished naturally, free of any devices that smack of contrivance.
Located near a lake in upstate New York, the isolated country house is owned by Gregory (Stephen Bogardus), a celebrated choreographer, and his considerably younger lover, Bobby (Justin Kirk), who is blind. Their regular guests include the desperately funny Buzz (Nathan Lane), a costume designer who is eager to be in a relationship ("I'm so intense," he says, "I need someone like Dennis Hopper"). Buzz had an affair some years ago with John (John Glover), an unsuccessful composer who is now a rehearsal pianist for Gregory's dance company and who brings along Ramon (Randy Becker), a hot young Latino dancer he's been having a fling with for a few weeks. As if to confirm that not everyone who is gay is a professional artist, there are also Perry (Stephen Spinella), a lawyer, and his lover, Arthur (John Benjamin Hickey), an accountant. They have been together fourteen years ("We're role models—it's very stressful," says Perry).
During the course of their trinity of holiday weekends (separated by two intermissions), these lovers and friends engage in lively discussions about social responsibility, reveal their innermost yearnings, swim and go for walks, betray and spy on one another, lash out and reaffirm their love. What emerges is a group portrait of an extended family that remains connected and concerned despite any fallings-out it endures.
Though Gregory is 43 and beginning to stiffen in the joints, he's struggling with a new dance piece to be premiered in the fall. He's also rehearsing his guests for an AIDS benefit in which they'll perform a selection from Swan Lake in drag—wonderfully realized in the last act.
Whenever epiphanies occur, McNally posits them in the midst of mundane circumstances, which reduces the poetic weight they otherwise bear. The wicked John periodically reads his host's private diary entries, thereby discovering how much he's disliked by the others. One of the evenings is interrupted by a phone call informing Bobby that his beloved sister has died in a freak accident in India. And life goes on.
The HIV-positive Buzz is so tired of thinking and hearing about AIDS that he's invented a game whereby anyone who mentions the word has to contribute five dollars to a fund. Buzz believes that "everybody's gay—or they should be," and he is, stereotypically, a musical comedy fanatic. He awakens startled the first night to report, "I was having a musical comedy nightmare. They were going to revive The King and I for Tommy Tune and Elaine Stritch. We've got to stop them!"
Buzz is deliciously acerbic and tends to lift everyone's spirits with his wild and wacky declarations, such as: "I'm sick of straight people. Tell the truth, aren't you? There's too goddamn many of them. I was in the bank yesterday. They were everywhere. Writing checks, making deposits. Two of them were applying for a mortgage. It was disgusting. They're taking over. No one wants to talk about it, but it's true."
This inverted homophobia becomes one of the ways McNally negates the differences between gays and straights, even as he dwells on homosexual behavior. It's over Memorial Day that Ramon seduces Bobby. By July 4 their tryst has developed into an affair that everyone but Gregory seems to know about. Also by July 4, John's twin brother, James, has arrived from London, where he sews costumes for a theater company. (The twins are portrayed by the same actor: When James makes his first appearance in the second of three acts, he winningly tells the audience, "It's not who you think—I'm the other one.") James is as sweet and goodnatured as John is selfish and nasty. In a coup de théâtre requiring directorial sleight of hand, the brothers confront each other on stage as John divulges how much he has always resented James.
Buzz and James, who has full-blown AIDS, proceed to fall in love. In one of the more touching scenes, Arthur and Perry are in a canoe passing Buzz and James in another boat on the lake. While the longtime couple are talking about their sense of survivor's guilt at having remained HIV-negative, Buzz has to deal with James, who just soiled himself and needs to be rushed back to the house.
Though Buzz has managed to fend off AIDS-related anxiety by retreating to the escapist world of musical comedies, his frustration only escalates now that he's finally in love with someone who is evidently close to death. In the play's most dramatic moment, Buzz pours his outrage into an explosive monologue that mocks his greatest passion. After tending to James, he screams, "I want to see a Sound of Music where the entire von Trapp family dies in an authentic Alpine avalanche. A Kiss Me, Kate where she's got a big cold sore on her mouth. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum where the only thing that happens is nothing and it's not funny and they all go down waiting, waiting for what? Waiting for nothing, waiting for death, like everyone I know and care about is, including me."
McNally clearly has compassion for each of his characters, and effectively transfers it to the audience. Some of the credit must go to the team involved in putting together this premiere production at the Manhattan Theatre Club, where its extended run through January has led to plans for a move to Broadway. From the uniformly exquisite ensemble to Joe Mantello's fluid direction, it's difficult to imagine any improvements. Loy Arcenas's abstract set design is an additional asset, permitting the stage to serve as many different interior and exterior locations, including a lake the group literally splashes around in at the end.
Though it seems unfair to single out any of the players, Nathan Lane's Buzz is further testimony that he is perhaps our greatest comic actor. And as both the resentful John and the gentle James, John Glover simply has more of an opportunity to display his range. But then, Stephen Spinella finds a range as well, given some inherent contradictions in Perry.
For the ways in which it's told no less than for what it has to say, Love! Valour! Compassion! is a remarkably Chekhovian work—which is to say vital and capacious, extremely natural yet poetic and crafted at the same time. (To borrow from Cynthia Ozick's remarks on Chekhov, this makes McNally a master of the observed as well as the unobserved.) While the title Love! Valour! Compassion!, which McNally found in one of Cheever's journal entries, is about as unfortunate as Lips Together, Teeth Apart, it is a perfect summary of the play's themes. Whether it was one of McNally's intentions or not, his play refutes many myths regarding a gay lifestyle: above all by demonstrating that there can be more love—and yes, courage and compassion—within an extended family than many nuclear ones possess.
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