‘Love! Valour!’ Wears Heart on Its Sleeve

“I love you, but you don’t love me. I would like to kill you, but I can’t so I will hurt you instead.” In the land of “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” Terrence McNally’s paean to friendship and love in the shadow of illness, eight male friends each know precisely what they’re feeling and why they’re feeling it, always.

Trading off narration like a baton, the friends are staying at a country house on a series of holiday weekends. Not only do they recite everything you could ever need to know about their internal or external experiences, they also know exactly when and how they will die. Going all the way with a technique he developed in “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” (and one that is a direct descendant of Eugene O’Neill’s “Strange Interlude”), McNally has written a play that has a hard, flat surface despite all of its humor and warmth. It is a play literally without subtext.

“Love! Valour! Compassion!” had its West Coast premiere on Wednesday at the Geffen Playhouse, and the play is soon to be released as a film as well. The Geffen production is impeccably directed and designed, as it was in New York, by Joe Mantello and Loy Arcenas, respectively.

Eight privileged but beleaguered gay men gather at the house of Gregory (William Bumiller, nicely mellow), a dancer and choreographer of some renown. In Arcenas’ design, Gregory’s Victorian home is a magnificent doll house, all aglow with light from inside, sitting on a gentle green slope, as in an enchanted storybook. This matches the tone of the play’s narration: “All in all, there was a lot of love in Gregory and Bobby’s house that first night of the first holiday weekend of the summer.” The little house soon exits to make room for the butting egos, loves and betrayals of the characters living and loving within.

The play starts out by resembling “Days of Our Lives”--we are plunged into a sexual roundelay before we even know who belongs to whom. “What name did Ramon whisper into Bobby’s ear that first night?” asks the narration, melodramatically. “Love! Valour!” is also a beefcakey play, with as much nudity as “Party,” the cheesy male striptease seen here last year. The nudity isn’t as gratuitous here, mainly because McNally is a writer who can convince us of many things--for instance, these characters just happen to like swimming naked.

But underlining everything is the playwright’s belief in forced intimacy. He insists that we understand and love these people. And so we hear the deepest thoughts and see the most intimate parts of people we don’t know very well. But McNally only occasionally earns that intimacy, and when he doesn’t, the play feels stretched and self-indulgent. He camouflages its flaws because he is, line for line, a fine writer and a very funny one.

*

Most of the hilarious moments are provided by Buzz (Mario Cantone), a rabid aficionado of musical comedy, who pouts extravagantly when crossed. McNally wrote this bravura part for Nathan Lane (Lane played a similar role in “The Lisbon Traviata” as well), a part in which McNally shows the dignity and passion in a character-type usually dismissed as silly. Cantone doesn’t so much imitate Lane as cross-pollinate Jerry Lewis with Charles Nelson Reilly. His ravings about the superiority of musical comedy to any other human achievement are endlessly entertaining.

Buzz is sick with AIDS, but he is brave and loving and angry. His friends are enormously supportive and understanding, except for the unsubtly named John Jeckyll (Ian Ogilvy), a Brit with James Bond suavity who is cold as ice and deadly mean. Why John is friends with Gregory is never made clear, but he happens to have a twin brother named James (also played by Ogilvy) who is as good as John is evil. Yes, it’s the evil twin theme, a hoary device, which McNally purposefully exaggerates in a dreadful scene in which John has a conversation with James, whose chair back is turned to us.

As for the rest of the group, Gregory’s younger blind lover Bobby (Mitchell Anderson) is positively saintly, except that he is tempted by the roiling sexual presence of a young dancer named Ramon (Randy Becker) whom John has brought along. Ramon is trouble with a capital T. Then there’s the longtime companions Arthur (Richard Bekins) and Perry (T. Scott Cunningham), both very solid, who are the group’s most stable couple (“We’re role models; it’s very stressful”).

“Love! Valour!” seeks to find in this charming, cohesive, battling group a window on how mostly decent people cope with simple betrayals and the more dramatic ones of mortality. The author’s needs show through the lines of the play, and you may be left more with McNally’s tenderness toward these characters than with your own. For this reason, and despite the play’s three acts and 3 1/2 hours, “Love! Valour!” seems only half written.

* “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood, Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Jan. 26. $27.50-$37.50. (310) 208-5454, (800) 233-3123. Running time: 3 hours, 30 minutes.

A production of the Geffen Playhouse in association with the Manhattan Theatre Club. By Terrence McNally. Directed by Joe Mantello. Choreography by John Carrafa. Sets Loy Arcenas. Costumes Jess Goldstein. Lights Brian MacDevitt. Sound John Kilgore. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.