The eight characters in Terrence McNally's new play, Love! Valour! Compassion! (terrible! title!), which just opened at his longtime theatrical home, the Manhattan Theatre Club, all happen to be gay, but they connect in ways that almost any nuclear family would envy. Most of them have a long history with each other—they have slept together, roomed together, worked together—and their relationships are rich and resonant. This is no uncomplicated idyll, though: some real ugliness comes out in the course of the play, and there are a number of betrayals, large and small. Yet in this beautifully written work McNally and his actors, under the direction of Joe Mantello, present humbling evidence of what human love is and can be.

The play is set in and around a house in the country in upstate New York on the three holiday weekends that punctuate the summer, and the three acts are punctuated by the men singing, in a-cappella harmony, songs from bygone days—"Beautiful Dreamer," "In the Good Old Summertime," and "Shine On, Harvest Moon." Gregory (Stephen Bogardus), a dancer, whose house we are in, addresses the audience and speaks with pride of his home, which was built in the early years of this century—the "golden age of American housebuilding." At the end of the play, the men, swimming naked in a lake, call up the image of a famous American painting, Eakins' "The Swimming Hole." The feeling of timelessness that imbues this play cuts both ways: as we're absorbing the lulling thought that there were others here before us and there will be others here after us, we're struck sharply by its unavoidable corollary—that we won't be here forever.

Early on, we're told outright that one of the guests, Buzz, who does costumes for Gregory's dance company, won't be here forever: he's H.I.V.-positive. But Buzz himself doesn't talk about it; in fact, his policy is that anyone who mentions AIDS this summer has to put five dollars into a kitty. Buzz, in yet another wonderful performance by Nathan Lane, eats, sleeps, and dreams musical comedy. When we first meet him, he's just woken up in a panic: "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 could have designed the set of L! V! C!, which is peculiarly Carousel—esque: a green hillock on one side of an almost bare stage, and a backdrop of stars against a night sky.) But the character goes beyond camp stereotype. As the summer has progressed, Buzz has found a new boyfriend, who has AIDS, and suddenly his world of happy endings, a world he can "get my hands around," breaks permanently loose from his grasp. In a rage, he shouts:

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 coldsore 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.

It's hilarious, and it's devastating, but it's by no means the only painful probing of the wounds that being alive causes. Over a dinner table, the men argue about whether people really can or do care about each other—an argument set off by a discussion of the news photograph of a starving Sudanese child being watched over by a waiting vulture—and an infidelity is confessed at a particularly unfortunate time.

All the actors bring something vivid to their roles. John Glover, playing identical twin brothers—a nasty Englishman and his sweet counterpart (who becomes Buzz's boyfriend in the second act)—goes easily and believably between extremes, and even seems to look different in the two parts. Bogardus, as the aging dancer, whose body has begun to protest, has a kind of embracing tenderness about him; for the duration of the play, you feel that you, too, are a welcome guest in his house. Justin Kirk and Randy Becker, as the youngest members of the group, offer mainly youth and beauty. (And plenty of it: those who complain about the lack of male nudity in the movies need look no further than this play.) Stephen Spinella and John Benjamin Hickey are touching as Perry and Arthur, a lawyer and an accountant, who have been together for fourteen years. "We're role models," Perry says. "It's very stressful." We know by the end of the play that they will stay together. Earlier, we see Perry trimming the hair in Arthur's ears, and Arthur says, only half-jokingly, "You know, if you really think about it, this is what it all comes down to." Perhaps McNally has put his finger on what it is that parents are talking about when they say that all they want is for their children to be happy.