There’s some very good work being done on the Westchester Playhouse stage in Kentwood Players frontal-nudity-free staging of Love! Valour! Compassion!, Terrence McNally’s three-and-a-half-hour-long celebration of gay love and friendship in the time of AIDS.

McNally’s 1995 Best Play Tony winner takes us back to the early 1990s and the lakeside summer vacation home of celebrated Broadway choreographer Gregory Mitchell (Matt Landig), 43, who has once again invited four of his best gay friends to join him and his blind, much younger boyfriend Bobby Brahms (Ray Tezanos) for the first of three holiday weekends in the country.

They are 40something “longtime companions” Perry Sellars (Christopher Tiernan) and Arthur Pape (Andre Heimos), the former a lawyer and the latter an accountant; failed, somewhat older English playwright John Jeckyll (Kevin Dulude); and sassy AIDS-diagnosed costume designer Buzz Hauser (Michael Mullen), whose eyes almost pop out of his head when who should pop up unashamedly naked on Gregory’s lawn but John’s 22-year-old boyfriend of three weeks Ramon Fornos (Giovanni Navarro), (or at least the aspiring dancer would be unashamedly naked had Kentwood Players not opted to clad him in a speedo).

 And as if hunky Ramon weren’t already enough of a catalyst for sexual shenanigans and dramatic conflict (the play opens with a flash-forward to a late-night nocturnal-emissions encounter between the Puerto Rican dancer and Bobby), things get even more explosive when the viperlike John’s saintly twin brother James (Dulude) shows up in Act Two with full-blown AIDS at a time when an AIDS diagnosis still equaled a death sentence.

Unlike Broadway’s previous examination of gay relationships (Mart Crowley’s The Boys In The Band), Love! Valour! Compassion!’s eightsome have embraced their sexuality without guilt and shame, thereby marking a decided step forward in gay representation on Broadway in a play that even 30 years later retains its potential to touch even the most hardened and homophobic of hearts.

Notwithstanding, the out-and-proudly gay Love! Valour! Compassion! is hardly what one would call traditional community theater fare, and for this reason alone Kentwood Players deserves credit for taking a chance on it as part of their 2025 season. Not only that, but it takes cojones for any theater to stage a play that (factoring in two intermissions) runs close to three-and-a-half hours.

Still, this reviewer can’t help wondering if Love! Valour! Compassion! oughtn’t be left to professional theater companies who don’t feel the need to hide its cast’s private parts when in-your-face nudity is an intrinsic part of the play’s DNA .

And this isn’t the only challenge posed by Love! Valour! Compassion!. Two of its characters must be credible as accomplished dancers, and age-appropriateness is essential for characters whose life experiences (or lack of such) are part of who they are.

In both these cases the Kentwood Players production falls short, though to his credit director Aric Martin has elicited generally fine work from his cast of seven, in particular from a fabulous Mullen in Nathan Lane-meets-Mario Cantone mode and from Tezanos, who embodies Bobby’s inner and outer beauty to captivating, touching effect.

A terrific Tiernan brings out Perry’s cruel streak opposite Heimos’s endlessly patient and loving Perry, Dulude creates two very different characters in “James the Fair and John the Foul,” Landig has touching moments as Gregory despite making the character’s speech impediment sound like he’s simply interjecting the word “um” whenever it’s written in the script, and Navarro gives Ramon plenty of seductive sex appeal.

Set designer Mimi Hrivnak follows the playwright’s instructions to keep the stage mostly bare and the scenery imagined, and Shirin Paulino’s costumes, Chris Ordonez’s lighting, Reagan Carter’s props, and Susan Stangl’s sound design have their pluses as well.

Love! Valour! Compassion! is produced by Martin Feldman and Lou Saliba. Elijah Green is swing. Ariella Salinas Fiore is intimacy coordinator. Jacques Fleming is stage manager and Carter and Chris Ordonez are assistant stage managers.

Kentwood Players’ Love! Valour! Compassion! may not be staged or cast precisely as Terrence McNally intended it to be, but at the very least, its arrival at the Westchester Playhouse gives L.A. audiences the chance to see this seminal gay play, and that alone deserves a round of applause.

Kentwood Players, 8301 Hindry Ave., Westchester. Through April 5. Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 2:00. Also Saturdays at 2:00 beginning March 25.
www.kentwoodplayers.org

–Steven Stanley
March 16, 2025
Photos: Gloria Ramirez Plunkett

Tags: Kentwood Players, Los Angeles Theater Review, Terrence McNally, Westchester Playhouse