Love! Valour! Compassion!, Organic Touchstone Company, at Touchstone Theatre. If Thornton Wilder were an openly gay middle-aged man today he might have written Terrence McNally’s 1994 play, about the evolving relationships among eight plucky, temperamental gay men who spend three holiday weekends together one summer. In this elegiac comedy, McNally uses the characters’ friendships and romances to mine insight into universal issues–the nature of love, the fear of failure, the inevitability of death–as Wilder did in such works as Our Town, The Matchmaker, and The Long Christmas Dinner. He also employs some of Wilder’s signature illusion-breaking devices–pantomime to depict activities such as swimming and boating, for instance, and characters directly addressing the audience. (In one scene here a blind man falls off the stage and brushes off viewers’ attempts to help him up.)
