McNally's 'Love! Valour! Compassion!' a stunner
PROVINCETOWN – When seven friends meet over three summer holiday weekends in a country house by a lake two hours from Manhattan – in addition to the requisite swimming, tennis, dinners and lots of talk – love, sex, betrayal, fidelity and AIDS take up their time.
The friends are upper-middle-class gay guys, and the play is Terrence McNally’s 1995 Tony-award winning play “Love! Valour! Compassion!”
The Provincetown Theatre, under the direction of the theater’s artistic director, David Drake, has mounted a stunning production. McNally’s funny, poignant, wistful play is splendid. The vibrant cast takes you on a roller-coaster ride through the joys and sorrows of these men, who find comfort and pleasure with one another but also competition, conflict and pain.
With McNally and his husband, Broadway producer Tom Kirdahy, sitting on the third row Thursday night, the actors played their hearts out as the various relationships intertwined in brotherly and sexual love. Arthur Pape and Perry Sellers have been together for 14 years, devoted and very much in love. Gregory Mitchell, who is the proud owner of his 1915 house, is a choreographer in love with Bobby Brahms, who is blind. John Jeckyll and Ramon Fornos, a dancer, are a couple, and Buzz Hauser is solo, at least for most of the play. The summer holiday is launched on a rainy Memorial Day weekend. The Fourth of July holiday heats up. And Labor Day weekend ends with new commitments, reflections, regrets and a riotously funny dance from “Swan Lake.”
The relationships are complicated, the issues diverse. These are all good friends, yet all is not smooth sailing. As Buzz, Justin D. Quackenbush is the comic relief. Brilliantly funny (in the role Nathan Lane played in the 1995 Broadway production), Quackenbush, a master of the one-liner, prances and pounces, covering for his lonely solo situation among the three couples. Throughout, Buzz delights in recalling the great Broadway musicals and the stars, whom, he charges, must all be gay. Ethel Merman? Julie Andrews? Gertrude Lawrence? “I think everyone’s gay, and if they’re not they should be.”
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Director Drake sensitively plays Gregory, the over-the-hill dancer working diligently on new choreography and in love with the much younger Bobby (Tommy Walsh). Bobby seems comfortable with his blindness, as the others are with their homosexuality. They are among friends, and the intensity of their friendship is palpable.
As Perry, Scott Douglas Cunningham wistfully takes a turn, among the others, narrating and reflecting on the action. With his lover, Arthur, movingly played by Mark Boucher, they represent long-term commitment.
Peter Gregus takes on two roles as John and his twin brother James, who arrives from England to even out the odd seven. Gregus gives a powerful performance as James, sick with AIDs, who finds a loving partner in Buzz. As the ironic John, Gregus takes over some of the narration, reading a journal not meant for his eyes. In a seductive segment, John makes love to Ramon, erotically portrayed by Adam Ross.
Take note: There is nudity when the men go skinny dipping and sun themselves.
Ellen Rousseau’s minimalist set design of a flat diagram of the house, with bedrooms blocked out for sleeping, easily converts to outdoor scenes.
This smashing production couldn’t be better, as it insightfully explores love and lust, passion and friendship in gay life, which is not so different, after all, from the pleasures, sorrows, regrets and vulnerabilities in all of our lives.
What: “Love! Valour! Compassion!”
Written by: Terrence McNally
When: 7:30 p.m. through Aug. 30
Where: Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St.
Tickets: $40
Reservations: 508-487-7487 or www.provincetowntheater.org
On Stage
