Aspects of Love and Compassion
[Brustein is an actor, director, theater critic, and author of several books about acting and the social responsibilities of the theater. In the following excerpt, he reviews Love! Valour! Compassion!, faulting its plot, characterizations, and themes as examples of "Yuppie Realism."]
I'm still disappointed in the direction of McNally's career…. Love! Valour! Compassion! is simply another example of what, in reviewing his Lips Together, Teeth Apart, I called Yuppie Realism, a genre that focuses "on upwardly mobile middle-class professionals, usually on vacation, in the act of exchanging witticisms while examining faulty relationships and compromised principles." Instead of being an advance in gay playwrighting, Love! Valour! Compassion! looks more like a regression to Boys in the Band. McNally is now stroking the gay audience in much the same way that Neil Simon used to pander to Jewish matinee ladies. There's obviously a lot of complacent consensual recognition between the spectators and the stage. What is lost is the penetrating particularity of the independent artist. The only thing that kept me sentient during this long evening was wondering about the exclamation marks in the title and why Valour was spelled with the British "u."
Love! Valour! Compassion! is less a play than a treatment for a T.V. series. It has everything required of a sitcom except a laugh track, and even this is provided by the live audience, which offers its Pavlovian response before an actor completes his line. Revolving around seven gay men vacationing at a house in Dutchess County on three summer holiday weekends, the play has no real subject other than sexual relationships—who is sleeping with whom, and how the who and the whom can be rearranged. Almost everyone in the play breathes the helium of high camp; virtually every action is the occasion for a smart remark.
The most explosive jokes of the evening belong to Nathan Lane, an irrepressible actor who should be forcibly repressed, and virtually all of them are based on references to show business. In the tradition of most McNally characters, Lane gets the laugh track spinning either by imagining unlikely Broadway revivals (a production of The King and I starring Tommy Tune and Elaine Stritch) or "outing" such unlikely people as Dan Rather and John Foster Dulles ("Ethel Merman was gay you know—so was Irving Berlin"), or invoking the recognition value of such favorites as Judy Garland and Glenda Jackson. Lane increases the decibel count to a painful level when he performs a version of the cancan, shouting "Eat your heart out, Donna McKechnie." At least the volume on your television set is controllable.
Except that they bear no resemblance whatever to recognizable human behavior, I don't have any fundamental objection to Broadway sitcoms, if that's what it takes to get people out of the house. McNally has a sharp edgy wit and he certainly knows how to feed bananas to hungry spectators. I probably wouldn't have found this evening so unappetizing were it not for the author's compulsion to shovel serious issues into the comic casing, in the manner of a butcher stuffing feed down the neck of a goose in order to enlarge its liver. It is manipulative to introduce such a painful reality as AIDS into a laugh-riot devoted to such artificial characters and events. Nathan Lane's HIV-positive Buzz Hauser stops camping just loud enough to plant a kiss on the lesion he has discovered on the breast of John Glover's AIDS-infected John Jeckyll, in much the same way that Sally in Lips Together, Teeth Apart stopped trading barbs for a moment to drink the water out of an AIDS-infected pool.
The major innovation of this play is that virtually everybody in it—and not just the muscled Latino youth (Randy Becker) whom everybody lusts after—eventually gets to take his clothes off. I haven't seen so many pecs and peckers on stage since Oh! Calcutta. If that's your cup of tea, or piece of cheesecake, then you may find some value in Love! Valour! Compassion! One character, the dancer Gregory Mitchell who owns this week-end house, seems to have some human dimension and is nicely played by Stephen Bogardus. The others, cast with very good actors, will undoubtedly soon be joining the play in the electronic media. Not since Hot L Baltimore has the Broadway theater provided such a successful tryout venue for network T.V.
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