Love! Valour! Fashion!

Out Magazine
April 1997

While six men in tutus dance in the attic... Stephen Spinella sits on a musty brown couch on the second-floor landing. It’s a momentous day on the set of Love! Valour! Compassion!, Fine Line’s movie adaptation of Terrence McNally’s 1994 Broadway hit and Tony Award-winning drama: the filming of the climactic ballet rehearsal scene. Spinella’s character, Perry, is suspicious of anything that’s in-your-face gay and refuses to participate in the ballet, which his friend Gregory is choreographing for an AIDS benefit. Instead of doing pirouettes, then, Spinella is dancing around the subject of Love! Valour!’s place in the pantheon of writings about gay lives.

“I think it’s more about dramas between characters and less about the drama of being a gay man of a particular generation,” the actor says over the din of 12 thumping feet and a recording of Swan Lake. A two-time Tony winner for his role as Prior Walter in both parts of Tony Kushner’s stage epic Angels in America, Spinella has been down this road before. It’s the perpetual dilemma of “gay theater”: Is this tale a universal expression of human striving and survival, or a hermetic tribute to a certain generation of well-off, white gay men, a last hurrah for those who came of age not long after Stonewall and were hit first by AIDS? “AIDS certainly plays a role here, but more as a disability to be dealt with by human beings than as a political focus,” Spinella says. “We recognize characters in this film that are applicable to a lot of periods in history.”

Upstairs, the six other cast members are locked arm-in-arm in a dead-pan chorus line, leaping across the dance studio for take after take. Even Jason Alexander, who plays perpetual come- dian Buzz, looks deadly serious, concentrating on the steps. Next to Alexander, reprising his Tony-winning double role as British twins John and James Jeckyll—one a manipulative misan- thrope, the other a giddy free spirit weakened by AIDS—lanky John Glover purposefully spins out of the line... and into the cameraman’s lap.

“Cut!” yells Joe Mantello. Love! Valour!’s original stage director and half of New York theater’s leading gay couple with his partner, playwright Jon Robin Baitz, Mantello is directing his first film here at Pointe Thibideau, the beautiful Montreal-area mansion that poses as the upstate New York home in McNally’s play. Due out in May, the film, like the play, takes place during three long summer weekends at Gregory’s country home, where the houseguests include two men with AIDS, a volatile long-term couple, an acerbic old friend, and a sexy dancer with the hots for Gregory’s younger blind boyfriend, Bobby. It’s Mantello’s hope that the movie “transcends this idea of a gay movie and can just be a good movie about gay people.” But, he adds, “it’ll be interesting to look back 20 years from now, like we do with The Boys in the Band, and see in what ways the film reflects its own times and in what ways it remains timeless.”

In many ways, 1970’s The Boys in the Band and Love! Valour! Compassion! are the bookends of more than 25 years of successful gay-themed plays brought to the silver screen. And like Boys, Love! Valour! has kept almost all of its theater-tested cast. That’s vital, Spinella says: “When you work with people for a while, you go to places that are less flip. There’s more substance, more weight now. You make it more complicated to keep it interesting.”

The film also follows in the footsteps of The Sum of Us (1994) and Jeffrey (1995) in putting the play’s director behind the camera—a decision not unrelated to the casting, says Mantello: “I was familiar with the material and had a long history with the actors, so I didn’t feel that kind of pressure to prove myself. If the movie succeeds, it’s because that intimacy translates onto the screen. These guys saved my butt!”

Still waiting for the next take, Mantello’s guys are milling around the overheated attic, their conversation somewhat removed from the film’s place in history. “Have you ever head-butted someone?” asks swarthy Randy Becker, who plays Ramon, the play’s mercurial Latin lover. Justin Kirk, cast as Gregory’s blind lover Bobby, replies, “Not successfully.”

“This thing is pinching me in places I didn’t even know about,” says John Benjamin Hickey, tugging at his tutu and sounding much like his character Arthur, an accountant partnered for 14 years with Perry. “But you still look very pretty,” pipes up Jason Alexander. On a break from taping NBC’s Seinfeld, Alexander fills the slippers vacated by Nathan Lane, who played show- tune-mad PWA Buzz on Broadway. Indeed, Lane’s abrupt departure from the film project during preproduction led many to accuse him of fleeing another gay role in the wake of The Birdcage, and it temporarily shut down the movie. Lane claimed a scheduling conflict, having agreed to play a retarded man in the TV movie The Boys Next Door. It’s all water under the bridge, says Mantello: “The greatest thing that happened to us was to have the project delayed for a year. We just couldn't get the play out of our heads; with time, we were able to let go of much more.” The only cast member who was not part of the debut production of McNally’s play at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Alexander found catching up with his practiced co-stars was no problem. “They all complained about the seven weeks of dance rehearsal required for the stage, and never really getting it,” the actor says of the ballet sequence, a gleam in his eye. “You know, I've got to say, I just nailed it!” “There was a great deal of anxiety about Jason’s becoming part of the dynamic these guys had worked hard to forge,” says Mantello, “but he made it easy for them to accept him, and they made it easy on him.” “Yeah, he even lets us watch movies in his trailer,” adds Kirk, grinning. “We don’t even have to say ‘Mr. Alexander.’” The TV star replies with a bitchy smile and an air kiss. As the filming day comes to a close, the exhausted men in white take a break on the mansion’s wraparound veranda, the St. Lawrence River reflecting the cobalt sunset behind them. Legs splayed, tutus in disarray, they scarf down sandwiches and cookies and consider the challenges of bringing their stage work to the screen. With screen adaptations now in the works for several other modern gay theater classics—including Martin Sherman’s Bent, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, and Kushner’s Angels in AmerIca—their observations take on meaning beyond the confines of this singular project.

“We were all wedded to different moments [in the play],” remembers Stephen Bogardus, who plays Gregory. “A lot was abridged, especially the frequent narration to the audience.” “There’s more nuance now,” adds Hickey. “You shoot one moment many times and you reflect more on it. There’s so much you can do without words.”

For Randy Becker, whose unabashed nudity in the play caused a minor press sensation during theatrical runs in both New York and, just this winter, Los Angeles, shooting nude scenes in the middle of a cold Quebec river instead of a warm theater proved unexpectedly complicated. “That was a full day of misery,” he says. “Not only did the hypothermia make it tough to act, but the cold water also has a big effect on the goods!” After the chuckles and digs from the others subside, a production assistant informs them that the ballet sequence is wrapped: They can change out of their costumes. Whoops of joy sound in the summer air, as the Canadian sun slips out of sight.
—Noah Cowan has contributed to Filmmaker and Time Out New York.