Over three holiday weekends -- Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day -- eight gay men spend time together as guests of choreographer Gregory Mitchell (Craig Nolan Highley) at his remote lakeside country home north of New York City. Terrence McNally's paean to the comradeship and courage of homosexual friends in the age of AIDS is vividly brought to life in the Louisville Repertory Company's stirring presentation of Love! Valour! Compassion!. It's a bittersweet drama with campy jokes and bitchy exchanges, as if to stave off awareness of time's relentless passage, threaded throughout. Each role is fully realized by a terrific cast under Emily Gnadinger's direction.
As a committed couple -- "role models" even -- of 14 years, lawyer Perry Sellars (Dennis J. Stilger) and accountant Arthur Pape (J. T. Taylor) are thoroughly believable in their relaxed enjoyment of each other. They're a delightful pair, whose stability any heterosexual couple would envy. As twin English brothers -- one evil, one good, both gay -- Darren McGee dazzles in his tour de force. The good twin's good luck, as his illness increases, in finding love with Buzz Hauser (Alan Jones) is extremely moving.
Jones is a scream as the vivacious wisecracker who thinks everyone (particularly unlikely types such as John Foster Dulles and Gertrude Lawrence) is or was gay and who views life through the lens of Broadway musicals (even such as Seventeen, Subways Are For Sleeping, and Happy Hunting). Bobby Brahms (Richard Isaacs) is the blind lover of choreographer Mitchell, and Isaacs is remarkable in conveying emotion without self-pity. After the sexy Puerto Rican dancer Ramon Fornos (John Johnson), who was brought to the gatherings by the evil twin, takes a fancy to the blind man and seduces him in a late night encounter in the kitchen, there's a painful scene between Bobby and Gregory. Johnson, whose uninhibitedly displayed body and dancing ability are extraordinary, is a powerful presence and a sensational actor.
McNally's play holds a mirror to a time and a place that the Louisville Repertory cast convincingly inhabits.
