Berkshires arts reviews

June 22, 2007 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion!, which delighted (and shocked) New York theatre audiences in 1995 and won the Tony Award for Best Play of the Year, is still a bold choice for the Berkshire Theatre Festival’s opening offering - a dozen years later.

(David Adkins, Jonathan Fried, James Lloyd Reynolds, Matthew Wilkas, Romain Fruge and Stephen DeRosa in Berkshire Theatre Festival’s Main Stage production of Love! Valour! Compassion!. Photo by Kevin Sprague.)

The script is plotless, yet interwoven with numerous small plots. The setting is specific - a remote house on a lake in NY’s Dutchess County, yet the stark playing area is a multilevel highly raked stage defined by the activities that occur on it. The time is 1994 with the three acts each occurring on a specific holiday - Memorial Day, July 4, and Labor Day; yet time itself warps and splinters.

The play itself defies categorization. At times very realistic; at other times any character may break the magic wall separating stage and audience and address us directly. The dialog is at times hilariously funny, full of laugh lines that keep the audience roaring; at other times the quiet pathos is so intense it brings tears to the eyes.

This unusual play, under the absolutely magical direction of Andres Cato, in a simple-seeming, yet unusually flexible setting designed by Hugh Landwehr, assisted by Jeff Davis’ lighting, with seven talented actors playing the eight male roles, is one that challenges an audience - and may shock as well.

The promotion warns of full frontal nudity, all the characters in the play are gay and involved in the tensions of their inter-relationships and especially in the overhanging presence of AIDS, already present in some and looming in the futures of others.

The AIDS crisis of 1995, not that far back, now somewhat muted, but still a real presence, tends to place the play historically, but not remotely. And the nudity, at times shocking but at other times akin to seeing a beautiful painting of two nude bodies on a sunlit-raft absorbing the beautiful summer day, before they dive, literally, from the raft into the water below. This nudity can shock or offend.

(This is not a play to which adjacent summer camps will bring busses full of campers to matinees!)

Each of the seven actors in the play is well cast and the relationships and angst offer varied characters and situations. One couple have been “married” fourteen years; another couple’s four year relationship is challenged. Past relationships have been shattered, current ones are in flux. And their sexual relationships are not their only concerns. There is the twin brother dying of AIDS in London, the sister killed in an accident, the growing awareness of youth and life passing them by, the coping gamely with being blind, as young Bobby (Matthew Wilkas) does.

And yet they cope, as Gregory Mitchell (Romain Fruge) a choreographer with aging legs, does, with strength to carry on, pass the torch to a young rival and choreograph a benefit ballet, danced in the final act by six males in white tutus.

Every actor on stage deserves high praise, especially David Adkins who plays the twin brothers John Jeckyll the “bad brother” who cynically reads Greg’s journal, and who has once had a relationship with Buzz Hauser (Stephen DeRosa) who in the first act is one of the most cynical (and comic) members of the group and who in the last act is one of the most sympathetic in his relationship with James Jeckyll, the “good brother” who is near death.

Adkins’s playing of the two roles (and Cato’s maneuvering and staging of them) is one of the play’s delights. And in the last act, the compassion act, Adkins manages to bring both brothers on stage at once in a moment that is extremely poignant.

This is not a play for the faint-hearted. It opens confusingly and a bit diffusedly in the first act, which seems a bit long, and in which one must get the sub-plots and characters sorted out. But it builds strongly in the second, and succeeds movingly in the brief
final act - the valour having grown to compassion.

For me, the brilliant staging - the flipping of front/back involving a tennis game played seemingly into the audience, the raft floating on the lake, again viewed by actors as in the audience, and the moving moments in which the actors went beyond the label “gay,” and were, as I believe the playwright wanted us to understand them to be coping, suffering, human beings.

The nonchalant boldness of the production may offend some, the plot or plot-lessness may bewilder others. This is a play that seeks to stretch theater boundaries and will engage those who view it on that level.

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