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Nudity! Profanity! `Swan Lake' in Drag! / Berkeley Rep co-produces West Coast premiere of Terrence McNally's risque play aboutgay life.

Article Excerpt
Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play "Love! Valour! Compassion!" is one of the most explicit and candid gay dramas ever to reach Broadway.

It also contains more full frontal male nudity than any Broadway show since the impudent revue of sexual revolution-era eroticism, "Oh, Calcutta!" stormed the Belasco Theatre in 1971.

And "Love! Valour! Compassion!" is so male gay-centric, there isn't a single straight or female character in sight.

SENTIMENTAL TALE

Yet at heart, McNally's chronicle of eight homosexual friends sharing several holiday weekends one summer, at the country home of a famous modern dancer, is essentially a bittersweet, sentimental tale of love, friendship and mortality in a solidly bourgeois milieu. And stylistically it owes far more to Anton Chekhov, Thornton Wilder and even Neil Simon than to such audacious, form-smashing gay dramatists as Tony Kushner and Harry Kondoleon.

"I think I wanted to write about what it's like to be a gay man in this particular moment in our history," McNally reflects in his preface to the published edition of the play. "I think I wanted to tell my friends how much they've meant to me. I think I wanted to tell everyone...