Love! Valour! Compassion!

We sat in the almost-too-close front row, my very first time in a Broadway theater. It was my own New York debut of sorts, having just moved up from South Florida, for a job I was terrified I was unqualified for, and still negotiating the city, a strange box-filled apartment, and the fraught eggshells and landmines of a corporate advertising agency. Robert, my fair-haired and handsome date, had secured the tickets as a surprise his first weekend up to visit. Even over the phone, he could sense my waves of panic about this City of Seven Dollar Sandwiches, and how badly I needed some salve, reprieve, and a familiar hand. So he came up, to treat the new New Yorker to a night on the town.

In Ft. Lauderdale, it had never dawned on me that there was this district of theaters, jewel boxes packed with sets and lights and stagehands and ingénues, open for business almost daily on the streets of New York, where normal people went normally to work, through small side doors, appeared in bright lights, exited in rapturous applause a few hours later, and emerged with traces of makeup, in ballcaps, beautifully exhausted, home to late supper. But here I was, surrounded by these places, these people.

I was a wide-eyed (grown) boy as we entered the Walter Kerr Theater that night. The wine-colored mohair seats, the high, gilded ceilings, the actual footlights, close enough to warm our faces, even with the June air conditioning floating down from somewhere high above. Even after seeing many a national tour at the Jackie Gleason Theater and Broward Center, and my own silent appearances as a Super alongside the corps and luminaries of the Greater Miami Opera at the deceptively grand elephantine Miami Dade Auditorium, this still felt like a dream. It dawned on me that this was the lode of ore, that we found ourselves seated on the banks of the source, the origin of the flowing spring.

I can summon it all now, like it was today: The funny hushed buzz, quiet and loud, but electric. The Trying to Stay Cool, the wanting to stare at my new citymates, to size them up, and the feeling that they all knew each other, a club I’d yet to be invited to, this seemingly curated collection of handsome gay New Yorkers, taking about two-thirds of the theater. It all filled my head, like heavily spiked elixir in a punch bowl, near overflowing.

We were at the edge of the stage for a late-in-the-run performance of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, a show I knew little to nothing about except from its frequent breathy, exclamations atop yellow cabs and the Kerr’s giant billboard, before Robert shared the surprise, so proud of our slightly comical proximity to the stage. To him, to us, Front Row was where New Yorkers probably sat.

The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and magic.

In the spilled-over light from the stage, I could not process the awe I was feeling, could not digest McNally’s razor-sharp, moving, hilarious words, could not drink in the mastery of the actors— some FROM TV!— mere feet away—and sometimes, without any clothes!— fast or fully enough. I could not contain the joy, could not snap the shutter in my head fast enough to capture these images, these sounds, these voices, these men, this wit, this thing, this experience.

This was a new world.

Most of my theater experiences up until that point had been far back in the audiences of musicals, and the big, blowsy touring shows, at that. This was something different. This was the pure power of crackling words, smoldering like embers sometimes, other times with the sharp heat and flash of fire, and the actors (and directors... Joe Mantello in this instance) who could coax this energy and three-sided reality from writer’s page to listener’s heart with no stops in between. I grinned as I cried, laughed as I mourned, let much of my own terror of the new pour through me, let some old out, a little new in. And in this audience, a tiny seed of belonging, and a lesson. From words.

L!V!C! also taught me that New York had a recent history I had only seen from the edges of my slightly out-of-sync Florida life, as handsome men slightly older than I grew slender then disappeared from Miami Beach, from dance troupes I knew from Burdines Teen Board, the flashing lights and purple shadows of the Copa. From the words on stage, it was obvious in that darkened theater that AIDS was not at the edges, but at the core, here, a river which ran deeper in New York. It washed over me, through me, and in waves of muffled sobs around me. These words from the stage let us mourn, for beauty gone like pale smoke, remembering and honoring a lost generation of handsome men fading from photographs but never, ever from memory, alive again here.

All this through the words on paper of playwright Mr. McNally: a prolific genius, through his own masterworks and in sparkling, brilliant, intelligent collaborations with fellow legends. I’d grow to learn I knew more of his work than I thought, and it was a name that appeared over and over again in my growing stack of Playbills, as I eased into Manhattan and realized Broadway, and the words of these poets, were things I loved.

Unlike many of my friends now in New York, I never had the honor of meeting Mr. McNally. But I met his words, his talent, the men of his memory and mind, his wit, wisdom and yes, his love, his valour, his compassion. Those words were not just a title that humid, electric night. They were an invitation, a pledge to be made. Words we can use, need to use, right now.

It is heartbreaking that this brilliant man, this survivor and chronicler of the AIDS era, was taken in the world’s most recent plague. If you’d read this on a script, you’d think, “no, too much.” I can think of no crueler larceny, this new thief of breath, a deep shadow among us, suddenly, unwelcome, unfamiliar, but also, not entirely unfamiliar, for so many Men of a Certain Age.

But as much as we cannot stop our vigilance, or let frustration of self-containment get the better of us or summon the worst in us, we cannot grow bitter from these newest losses, of Mr. McNally, or Mona Foot, or a nameless neighbor, in this city of obscene density and spectacular creativity. We learned resilience, we learned community, we learned how to channel anger to action and art and healing and recovery and survival and fierceness, all in the Age of AIDS. It is perhaps a lesson we need to brush off, a dusty schoolbook pulled from the shelf that still holds wisdom and merit and truth.

Goodnight, Mr. McNally. Thank you for your most spectacular welcome to New York. I promise: I will always try to live with love, valour, and compassion. And you taught me that, in that theater in June, from our front row seats.

Photo: Joan Marcus for Playbill