Theater : In the End, ‘Love!’ Prayers Are Answered

Nathan Lane has had several great roles in his career--from Mendy, the hilarious opera queen in Terrence McNally’s “Lisbon Traviata,” to Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls,” to Timon, the wise-cracking meerkat in “The Lion King”--but he has never had a role as full of humor and pain as he does in “Love! Valour! Compassion!”

In the new McNally play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Lane plays Buzz Hauser, a musical comedy fanatic who can always find a suitable quote from “Annie Get Your Gun” or “Guys and Dolls” to pepper his already animated conversation.

Honed by a lifetime of theater-going, Buzz’s ebullience is a tonic of immeasurable value for him and for the seven gay friends who gather in the country house of Gregory (Stephen Bogardus), an aging choreographer with a generous spirit, for three holidays one summer. Two of the men are dying, and the rest have their share of troubles too.

In “Love! Valour! Compassion!” McNally takes a leap in developing the hybrid style with which he began experimenting in “Lips Together, Teeth Apart.” McNally’s experiment is akin to Eugene O’Neill’s in “Strange Interlude” but less pretentious, with a voice that fluctuates amid first-person narration, internal monologue and realistic, if flatly stated, dialogue.

*

Stylistically, McNally seems influenced by the simple poetry of children’s bedtime stories. “All in all, there was a lot of love in Gregory and Bobby’s house that night, on the first holiday weekend of the summer,” is a typical sentence in the narration, which is passed from character to character like a baton throughout the evening. The play’s intermittently cloying tone extends beyond the narration. One character thanks God “for the sweet, sweet air and all of us together in Gregory’s house.”

The play’s gentle, almost sing-songy voice is an interesting counterpoint to the characters’ frank expressions of desire for the nude male form, which several of the characters display without being asked. Almost as prominent among these characters is the yearning for all-encompassing love, an urgent need in the atmosphere of fragile mortality that continues to define the gay community.

Buzz begins as the only unattached man in the country house. He is dying, and his need to be loved cuts sharply and clearly through all of this particular summer’s many anguishes. Lane’s perfect timing has to be seen to be believed, and Buzz’s every line seems a perfectly polished comedic gem. (Did McNally give him all the best lines, or does it just seem that way?) Similar to but more fleshed out than the hyper and wildly funny character Lane played in “Lisbon Traviata,” Buzz fears his intensity drives men away. “They say, ‘What’s your rush,’ (I) say, ‘What’s your delay?’,” he explains with an increasingly combustible anxiety that can take him to the brink of hysteria in the space of one sentence. He wonders if maybe he should be dating “someone like Dennis Hopper.”

Buzz loves musical comedy, believes that everyone is gay and exhibits a partially put-on paranoia about heterosexuals (“There’s too God-damned many of them. I was in the bank yesterday--they’re everywhere!”) While he is too witty to be a stereotype, Buzz is emblematic of a certain sensibility, his humor fueled by the desperation and anger of someone always made to feel like he’s surviving rather than simply living. In Buzz, McNally personalizes the devastation of AIDS on the gay community, because you feel how profound the loss of this person will be to his friends and to anyone with a sense of humor who comes in contact with him.

Often, however, McNally does not so much personalize as externalize the characters’ anguish. One character cries out his pain: “It’s all so (expletive) fragile. It’s so arbitrary.” Watching the police bash gay protesters on the TV news, another character exclaims, “What is wrong with this country? They hate us; they always have. It never ends, the (expletive) hatred.” While people do, of course, talk like this, one can’t help feeling that McNally could evoke his characters’ anguish more if he didn’t spell it out quite so baldly.

Director Joe Mantello has orchestrated the play’s many moods with great fluidity, and the ensemble of gifted actors feels, looks and sounds like a true community, with all its shifting loyalties and furies. Especially good are Bogardus, as the spiritual center of this household and Justin Kirk as Bobby, a young blind man torn between his love for the aging choreographer and a need for experience outside the safety of Gregory’s devotion.

Playing the twins James and John Jeckyll, John Glover runs into trouble while carrying the burden of the play’s most schematic device. His James, the good twin, is a fussy grandmother complete with glasses low on nose and a high, trilling voice. Meanwhile, the malicious John roams the house reading Gregory’s journal in a masochistic exercise to find out he is disliked by even the most generous of the men, exhibiting a transparent and predictable need to be loved at the foundation of this character. Glover cannot rescue James and John from cheesy theatricality.

McNally has not made every character as seamless and believable as Lane’s Buzz, who rails against his impending death by attacking what he loves most--the call to survival and joy that is the Broadway musical. “I want to see a ‘Sound of Music’ where the entire Von Trapp family dies,” he exclaims, refusing to be calmed.

But we get to see another side of Buzz, when he at long last finds, in James, a love that allows him to give all of himself. As they dance, his head rests against James’ shoulder and his antic features relax in a momentary peace. His release blankets the theater like the deepest balm imaginable. Dancing nearby, Perry (Stephen Spinella) notices, and mutters, “Look--answered prayers.” Indeed, at that moment all prayers are answered--for Buzz and for audiences alike.

* “Love! Valour! Compassion!” Manhattan Theatre Club, City Center, New York, (212) 581-1212. $40.