Love! Valour! Compassion!
by Terrence McNallyDecember 16th at 7pm
Winner of the 1995 Tony Award for Best Play!
Join us for our next installment of Gay Play Tuesdays on December 16th at 7pm, when we will read Love! Valour! Compassion! by Terrence McNally (1995).
A group of gay New Yorkers – including longtime friends Buzz Hauser, an HIV-positive Broadway musical enthusiast; John Jeckyll, a dry-witted British composer; and Gregory Mitchell, a prominent Broadway choreographer – spend summer weekends together at a lakeside house in upstate New York. As the season progresses and secrets begin to surface, the complex relationships within the group are sometimes strained and sometimes strengthened. As The New Yorker published in 1995, “in this beautifully written work McNally…presents humbling evidence of what human love is and can be.”Terrence McNally (1938 – 2020) was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as “the bard of American theater” and “one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced,” McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.
To sign up for Gay Play Tuesdays:
Love! Valour! Compassion!
What is “Gay Play Tuesdays”?
What makes a “gay play?” Is it dependent on the identity of the author or characters? The reception of the play by LGBTQIA+ audiences? The play’s politics or aesthetics? Or is there something else, less definable, that might make a play a gay classic?
Join our Resident Dramaturg, Jesse Marchese, for a monthly free play reading salon where we will investigate some of the most impactful, provocative, and fearless “gay plays” from the 20th and 21st centuries. Being a “salon,” this is not a professional performance. Rather, we treat each session as a classroom where the plays are our teachers.
We will treat every session as a first read through, assigning parts on a first come, first served basis. You are welcome to come and read a role out loud or just listen along – no experience necessary! Once we finish reading through the play we will engage in a short discussion of its themes and ideas.
