Love! Valour! Compassion!
Love! Valour! Compassion! is a play by Terrence McNally. Its off-Broadway premiere took place at the Manhattan Theatre Club on October 11, 1994, in a staging by Joe Mantello that ran for 72 performances. The production transferred to the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway, where, after 28 previews, it opened on February 14, 1995, and closed on 17 September after an additional 248 performances.
The setting is at a lakeside summer vacation house in Dutchess County, two hours north of New York City where eight gay friends spend the three major holiday weekends of one summer together for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day. The house belongs to Gregory, a successful Broadway choreographer now approaching middle age, who fears he is losing his creativity; and his twenty-something lover, Bobby, a legal assistant who's 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 theater fanatic 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 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.
Presented by PACT Drama at the National Arts Festival, directed by Mark Graham, starring Drummond Marais, Greg Melvill-Smith, Blaise Koch, Philip Godawa, Russel Savadier, Kenneth Robinson, James van Helsdingen.
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love!_Valour!_Compassion!
National Arts Festival programme, 1996.
Return to L in Plays 1 Original SA Plays
Return to L in Plays 2 Foreign Plays
Return to South_African_Theatre/Plays
Return to Main Page
