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| The Cast of "Love! Valour! Compassion!" (photo: Richard Hale/Silverline Images) |
With
its titillating exclamatory title, Love! Valour!
Compassion!, by Terrence
McNally, was first produced in 1994 off-Broadway, then in 1995 on
Broadway, where it won the Tony Award for Best Play. That title,
McNally revealed in the published edition of his play, came from an
entry he read in the journals of John Cheever. It induced him to
write about what it was like to be a gay man at a particular moment
in our history, expressed he thought as a sigh or a dream; Cheever
generally thought of the phrase as referring to incantation, having
heard a man in the woods shouting it, as though about some moral
chain of being. McNally stated that he wanted to demonstrate the
“burden of men without grace”, searching for the secret of
unconditional love, often frustrated in this work but never
abandoned, always hoped-for. In his story of eight gay friends and
lovers, some old, some new, some borrowed, some blue, he filled it
with witty one-liners, but with melancholy underneath it all. It was
at one and the same time both high camp and pathos as its several
characters searched for true love and happiness with the knowledge
that “we won't be here forever”, some of them literally.
Zeitgeist Theatre has thus produced two plays considered
milestones of gay theater, Matt Crowley's Boys in the Band
(“show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse”) and
McNally's much more positive portrayal here, even as the scourge of
AIDS was making its pervasive presence known.
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| David Anderson & Michael J. Blunt in "Love! Valour! Compassion!" (photo: Richard Hale/Silverline Images) |
The story takes place at the remote summer house and surrounding woods owned by Gregory Mitchell (David Anderson), successful but aging choreographer, and Bobby Brahms (Cody Sloan), his lover, a blind legal assistant, by a lake in Dutchess County, two hours north of New York City, over the weekends of Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day respectively. Visiting them are John Jeckyll (Brooks Reeves), a rather nasty dance rehearsal pianist, Ramon Fornos (Michael J. Blunt), his summer lover, Buzz Hauser (Jeremy Johnson), a costume designer, John's twin James Jeckyll (Reeves again) whom everyone loves, and role model couple accountant Arthur Pape (Keith Foster) and lawyer Perry Sellars (Joey C. Pelletier). A weekend in the country is a familiar set-up, from Chekhov to Sondheim, but these three successive holiday weekends are ones with humor as well as sadness, yet they are never maudlin. It's both funny and bittersweet, thanks to this terrific ensemble. The play, and this production of it, are profoundly loving, valiant and compassionate.
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| The Cast of "Love! Valour! Compassion!" (photo: Richard Hale/Silverline Images) |
Beneath some bitchy banter amongst these clearly
extraordinarily ordinary men, there are themes both evocative and
profound, quite believable dialog and problems both ordinary and
extraordinary, as these characters, gradually and with graceful ease,
reveal their inner selves, in both natural and poetic terms. Two of
them are found to be suffering with AIDS (at a time when it was akin
to a death sentence). Another, Perry, becomes the raisonneur
of the group, the one character who voices the central theme or
philosophy of the work, as he and Arthur deal with survivor guilt.
Ramon says “we don't love one another because we don't love
ourselves”, yet it's not because of any of the self-loathing
pervading Boys in the Band. They end up in a skinny-dipping
exercise straight out of Thomas Eakins' homoerotic painting The
Swimming Hole, after a shatteringly moving monologue by Reeves
as John and a series of disclosures of the future of the ensemble,
from the semi-patriarchal pain-wracked Anderson to the warm and wise
young Sloan, to the one-liners zinged by Johnson, to the predatory
but deeply human Blunt, to the precarious pairing of the
well-intentioned pair of Foster and Pelletier, all of whom have been
meticulously directed by David Miller (who also created the versatile
Set Design). The fine Costume Design was by Elizabeth Cole Sheehan,
with atmospheric Sound Design by Jay Mobley and effective Lighting
Design by Michael Clark Wonson.
This is one of this company's finest and most memorable
productions in a wonderful season. The last word (which, Perry toward the beginning of the
play claimed to John, “you got that from me, you know”) belongs
to John. It was what
the exclamation “whatever” is today: “Anyway....”
Go!
See it! Until May 19th!
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