Voice of Equality Productions is opening the summer season with the modern gay-theater classic “Love! Valour! Compassion!”
The Tony Award-winning play, written by Terrence McNally, follows eight gay men who spend three summer weekends together at a vacation house, where they end up hashing out their passions, fears and differences. The play originally opened off-Broadway in 1994 and quickly became a social and critical touchstone for the LGBT community.
More than 20 years later, the world is a different place and the LGBT community has evolved. But Voice of Equality artistic director Troy Cooper said that gay culture, as portrayed in “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” is more timely and vital now than it was when the work first debuted.
“With the advent of social media and the wide acceptance of gay culture, we now find our friends a little more disposable,” Cooper said. “If people do things that are inconvenient to us or bother us, it’s easier now for us to write off our friends.”
The dynamics of the play are such that our current culture would have these friends writing each other off.
“In the ’90s, before there was a ton of acceptance, your friends were your friends and you made it work because they were what you had. They were the family that you chose, and a lot of times your own family had written you off because there wasn’t more global acceptance. So you found a way to make it work.”
That theme is still relevant, said Cooper. “We as a community need to be more together and find ways to forgive and accept and get past things and have communication. We need to treat our friendships as you would a long-term relationship.” The show points out how important it is to maintain relationships with friends, he added.
The play also addresses the AIDS epidemic, a dark cloud for the people who lived through that era.
“With the presence of PrEP, we’ve turned a blind eye to the importance of safe sex and having information about your partner,” Cooper said. “We open up the dialogue of what AIDS was and what it meant to people. There were challenges then that are not there and the way was paved for you and you need to be reminded of that.”
The director said that in order to create a more believable rapport among the actors, he’s having them spend time together outside rehearsals.
“We are taking them on a retreat up to Rainbow Mountain,” he said. “They are spending a night at an actual lake house just to further that bonding. I thought it was important for this show because we’re talking about a group of characters who are supposed to have known each other for years.”
Cooper said he hopes that audiences, as well as some of the actors, will come away from “Love! Valour! Compassion!” with a deeper appreciation of the LGBT experience.
“When I started this theater company, I set out for it to really be about using the arts to further understanding of LGBT culture,” he said. “In this show I have seven actors. Four of them identify as heterosexual males. They’ve taken the time to really embrace the culture, asked all the right questions and are completely comfortable with the intimacy that they have to share with each other. To me, if we accomplish nothing else artistically with this show, the fact that I have four people from a different walk of life who have decided to embrace and understand, I consider it a success no matter what.”
Voice of Equality Productions presents “Love! Valour! Compassion!” May 18-20 at Ruba Club, 416 Green St. For more information or tickets, call 215-627-9831 or visit www.facebook.com/VoiceofEquality.