Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), a play by Terrence McNally. [City Center, 321 perf.; Tony, NYDCC Awards.] Gregory Mitchell (Stephen Bogardus), a famous Manhattan choreographer, opens up his 1915 vintage summer home on a lake in upstate New York for three holiday weekends, inviting some of his closest gay friends to relax with him. But each guest brings so much emotional baggage with him that the weekends become fraught with subtle as well as overt tension. The colorful guests include the flamboyant costume designer Buzz (Nathan Lane); the frustrated English composer John (John Glover) and his twin brother, the gentle James (Glover also); and the blind Bobby (Justin Kirk). There was little plot but a lot of Chekhov‐like meanderings punctuated by plenty of in‐jokes about the gay theatre world. Joe Mantello directed the Manhattan Theatre Club production, Loy Arcenas designed the atmospheric set that included a dollhouse version of the farmhouse, and the play was popular enough to transfer to Broadway's Walter Kerr Theatre for a profitable run.
Themes: Faltering Friendships, Vacation Romances, Living With AIDS
Director: Joe Mantello
Main Cast: Jason Alexander, Randy Becker, Stephen Bogardus, John Glover, John Benjamin Hickey
Release Year: 1997
Country: US
Run Time: 110 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
Eight friends spend three weekends in the country over the course of a summer as they explore their sometimes conflicting attitudes about love, sex, friendship, life, and death in this screen adaptation of Terrence McNally's award-winning play. Gregory Mitchell (Stephen Bogardus) is a successful choreographer whose skills as a dancer have begun to decay as he slips into middle age. He has a handsome summer home in Upstate New York which he shares with his lover Bobby Brahms (Justin Kirk). Gregory and Bobby often invite several of their friends to join them for holiday weekends: Perry Sellars (Stephen Spinella) and Arthur Rape (John Benjamin Hickey) are a pair of yuppies (complete with a Volvo) who have been a couple for 14 years (as Perry jokes, "We're role models -- it's very stressful"). John Jeckyll (John Glover), a musician and composer with a short temper and a witheringly bitter sense of humor, arrives with his latest boyfriend, Ramon Fornos (Randy Becker), a good-looking dancer who often suffers the wrath of John's foul mood. Buzz Hauser (Jason Alexander) is a witty and flamboyant enthusiast of the Broadway theater who describes his greatest fear as a production of The King and I starring Tommy Tune and Elaine Stritch; he's also HIV-positive, though he stubbornly refuses to discuss his condition with his friends. And John's twin brother James Jeckyll (also played by John Glover) is his brother's polar opposite, a kind and forgiving soul who is now living with AIDS. Love! Valour! Compassion! was directed by Joe Mantello, who also directed the original New York stage production; this film also reunites the show's New York cast, with the exception of Jason Alexander, who stepped into the role created by Nathan Lane. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
It's amazing how quickly the gay zeitgeist changes. By the time this Terrence McNally adaptation hit theaters in 1997, the reality of the AIDS epidemic had been forever altered by the advent of the triple cocktail. And a mere five years later, in the the post-Ellen, post-Will & Grace, gays-everywhere era, even the film's low-key political subtext seems like an '80s anachronism. Yet the enduring strength of Love! Valour! Compassion! is its attention to character, to the complexities of a social set, and to the ways in which chance events can ripple across them, changing everything. Full of fine performances from the well-oiled Broadway cast (with Jason Alexander ably subbing for the absent Nathan Lane), the film doesn't exactly break free from its stage incarnation. But, boxed-in as it is, the film's characters seem real, and the simple push and pull of their interlocking friendships keeps the action moving. A willfully affirming answer to the self-hatred of The Boys in the Band a few decades earlier, the film does tend to wear its heart on its sleeve. But its fine performances, economical setting, and mournful warmth mark it as a superior effort -- superior not only to all those endless, by-the-books coming-out stories, but also to the slew of comedies that followed it in the separate subgenre of scripts that deal with the complexities of gay middle age. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! opened Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1994 and then transferred to Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1995. This was in the middle of the 1990s — a decade in which the playwright garnered an impressive four Tony Awards. The others included Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1994), Best Play for Master Class (1996), and Best Book of a Musical for Ragtime (1998). He also scored a theatrical "hat trick" in 1996 when three of his productions ran simultaneously on Broadway: Kiss of the Spider Woman, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and Master Class.
Love! Valour! Compassion! was hailed by many critics as McNally at the top of his form. The play centers on eight gay men who vacation together at an upstate New York country home for three summertime holiday weekends. Gregory, the host of the gatherings, is a successful but aging choreographer trying to complete what may be his last major work. Bobby, his blind and much younger live-in boyfriend loves him but is still discovering who he is and what he wants from the world. John is a cynical, mean-spirited, failed English playwright, relegated to working as a rehearsal pianist for Gregory's company. His twin brother, James, a costumer for the National Theatre of Great Britain, is as kind and compassionate as John is angry and alienated. He is also dying of AIDS. Ramon is John's current boyfriend. He is a young, handsome, and talented Puerto Rican dancer just beginning his career. He is also filled with confidence, brimming with sexuality, and very attracted to Bobby. Perry and Arthur are the group's "role models." Although they constantly bicker and feud, the lawyer and accountant have been together for fourteen years and are often the force of stability in an otherwise chaotic world. Finally, there is Buzz, the highly charged and hilarious costumer for Gregory's company who is obsessed with musical theatre, always ready with a sarcastic one-liner, and is usually the life of the party. Like James, he is HIV-positive, and his high jinks often mask his troubled spirit.
Readers of Love! Valour! Compassion! will find a formula that has worked well for McNally in some of his other successes: a group of characters gathered together for a weekend of talking, laughing, and exploring the boundaries of their relationships and some of life's more profound and difficult questions. In his introduction to the published play, McNally reveals, "I wanted to write about what it's like to be a gay man at this particular moment in our history. I think I wanted to tell my friends how much they've meant to me. I think I wanted to tell everyone else who we are when they aren't around."
Mostly comic, the play manages to include elements of seriousness and even tragedy. It employs some unconventional theatrical techniques. The stage is mostly bare, the scenery imagined, and each of the characters takes turns narrating the action, alternately speaking directly to the audience and to one another. It is, as the 1997 film version of the play was billed, an outrageous mix of the The Big Chill and The Bird Cage.
It revolves around eight gay men who gather for three summer weekends at a lakeside house in
Dutchess County, two hours north of New York
City, to relax, reflect, and plan for survival in an era plagued by AIDS.
The story of eight gay male friends who spend the three major holiday weekends of one summer - Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and
Labor Day - together at a house in upstate New York. The house belongs to
Gregory, a successful choreographer now approaching middle age, who fears he is losing his
creativity; and his twenty-something lover, Bobby, who happens to be blind. Each of the guests at their house is connected to
Gregory’s work in one way or another - Arthur and longtime partner Perry are business consultants; John Jeckyll, a sour
Englishman, is a dance accompanist; die-hard musical theaterfanatic Buzz Hauser is a costume designer and the most
stereotypically gay man in the group. Only John's summer lover, Ramon, and John's twin
brother James are outside the circle of friends. But Ramon is outgoing (to say the least) and eventually makes a place for
himself in the group, and James is such a gentle soul that he is quickly welcomed. Infidelity, flirtations, soul-searching, AIDS, truth-telling and
skinny-dipping mix monumental questions about life and death with a wacky
dress rehearsal for Swan Lake
performed in drag.
In 1997, a film adaptation written by McNally reunited the original cast, with the exceptions of Nathan Lane (who was busy
with a Broadway revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way
to the Forum at the time) and Anthony Heald. Seinfeld co-star
Jason Alexander stepped in for Lane (and was given top billing in the hope his TV
audience would be drawn to see him on the big screen) and Stephen Spinella replaced
Heald.
As with many screen adaptations of stage plays, the script underwent numerous changes, eliminating almost all direct addresses
to the audience and the conclusion of one of the subplots. This remains the only theatrical film directed by Joe Mantello, who
was nominated for the Grand Special Prize at the Deauville Film
Festival.
Publication
McNally, Terrence. Love! Valor! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh. Plume, 1997. 272 pp. ISBN 0-452-27930-5
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