Love! Valor! Compassion! and A Perfect Ganesh: Two Plays (Drama, Plume)
McNally's big hit of last season--Love! Valour! Compassion!is one of those rare works that lives up to its hype. By turns charming and poignant, funny and sad, sweet and sexy, the play follows a group of close gay friends and their assorted boyfriends and family through a season at a summer place in upstate New York. As in life, the great dramatic moments are quiet and underplayed; for example, the betrayal at the peak of the play, which ultimately threatens to tear apart the closest of friends, begins as an unplanned sexual indiscretion. With this play, McNally shows he has become a master at handling serious issues in comic ways or revealing in a breathtaking instant the tragedy that lies just behind comedy. This triumph is paired with McNally's recent bomb,A Perfect Ganesh, a flawed but intriguing work in which we follow a pair of suburbanites on their tour of India.Jack Helbig