The mortal sins and wins of ‘Love! Valour! Compassion!’

It’s not easy to generalize about the eight gay men who spend an arc of summer holidays — Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day, 1994 — in a Hudson Valley country home in Terrence McNally’s achingly funny and generously human play, “Love! Valour! Compassion!”

And in David Drake’s splendid production at the Provincetown Theater, the Cape Cod premiere of McNally’s modern Broadway classic, which is playing through Aug. 30 and not to be missed, the characters are so lovingly individuated that it’s impossible to mix them up (with or without their clothes on). This is thanks to the author, a master at giving a voice to those onstage that’s recognizably real yet fresh and broadly meaningful. And it’s also due to the passion and courage and craft of the actors, who range from amateur to seasoned pro.

Drake, the company’s artistic director, both directed “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (with an associate, Myra Slotnick) and plays Gregory, the successful middle-aged choreographer who hosts his friends at the home he shares with his blind and much younger lover, Bobby (Tommy Walsh). Gregory’s relationship with Bobby is romantic in an almost fearful, guilty way: they protect and tend to each other, Gregory like a parent doting on a vulnerable pet, and Bobby refusing to believe that his disability holds him back. Gregory is afraid of losing his artistic prowess, which defines him, and his terror of aging is made vivid by Drake, who is almost violent when rehearsing a dance routine alone. He puts Bobby on a pedestal and is then unable to process his inevitable fall from grace. Walsh is moving and enduring in depicting Bobby’s innocence: when hunky houseguest Ramon (Adam Ross) quickly seduces him in the middle of the night while he goes to get a glass of milk in the kitchen (a scene that has a touch of ’50s movie melodrama, from Sirk to Ray), the libido that moment unleashes proves beyond containment, and Bobby can’t deal with it.

Ramon, on the other hand, is a dancer, an outsider and almost shallow in his self-containment. He has been brought into this show-biz clique by John (Peter Gregus), a sour British musical accompanist whose bitterness and cynicism are well near incurable. Ramon and John have some erotically charged moments, but John mostly lets Ramon wreak havoc on his housemates. John also reads Gregory’s diary aloud shamelessly, and this adds to the play’s many voices of narration.

Ostensibly, the tale is told directly to the audience by Perry (Scott Douglas Cunningham), but this fourth-wall-breaking narrator is often joined by other characters, which highlights the self-consciousness of the entire group. Perry is an entertainment lawyer, and his long-term companion (no marriage yet in 1994) is Arthur (Mark Boucher), an accountant. Perry is taken to moments of unfiltered pique, when he spews racist, sexist and all-around offensive language one might not expect from such an A-gay professional. Arthur is correspondingly sensitive and well-meaning, and Boucher and Cunningham make a pleasant minuet of their white-bread “role model” relationship, bickering and apologizing and focusing on the foibles of others.

Then there’s James, British John’s twin brother (also played by Gregus), whose oppositeness — James is as sweet and considerate as John is nasty and devious, their last name being, ahem, Jeckyll — is a tragicomic trope that McNally soaks for all its worth. John has a habit of going off and playing classical piano, at which point James appears. (Gregus does an outstanding job of distinguishing the two roles, subtly and unmistakably changing his stance and voice.) James has come to be with his brother because his case of AIDS is reaching its final stages. This is 1994, two years before the cocktail appeared, when the epidemic had laid waste to the creative gay community in New York. AIDS is an underlying presence in “Love! Valour! Compassion!” — but there’s a weariness and numbness to the zeitgeist in the house. No one here is joining ACT UP.

Which ties in to the final member of this octet, Buzz (played by Justin D. Quackenbush), who is HIV positive but not nearly so bad off as James. Buzz, a career breakthrough role for Nathan Lane at the time when “Love! Valour! Compassion!” premiered, is a Broadway-obsessed queen with a sharp tongue and an irrepressible need to grandstand, a mix of theater nerd and Harold and Emory in “Boys in the Band.” Quackenbush takes Lane’s comic imprint to a new level, humanizing it, trumpeting it, physicalizing it with his larger frame (the bit with an apron and bare butt is screamingly funny), and stealing every scene he’s in. He’s as riveting as any of the drag queens in Provincetown (and that’s saying something), and yet his scenes with Gregus’ James, as they fall for each other and comfort each other, are among the most touching in the play.

The fear of dying, the fear of irrelevance, runs throughout “Love! Valour! Compassion!” Drake does a fine job of weaving that into the comedy, but he had a lot of help, from the performers and even the production: the set by Ellen Rousseau, for example, an angled architectural drawing of the house sided with fabric trees, is inspired and works like a charm. McNally, who attended the premiere on Thursday, seemed thoroughly pleased to see his play — one of the three greatest of the AIDS era, with “The Normal Heart” and “Angels in America” — performed in Provincetown. That’s a credit to the Provincetown Theater, and something of which all who attend might be proud.

What: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” by Terrence McNally

When: 7:30 pm Monday-Thursday, thru Aug. 30

Where: Provincetown Theater, 238 Bradford St.

Admission: $40 at provincetowntheater.org, (508) 487-7487 & 230 Commercial St.

Eight men, three holidays