SOURCE: "McNally Men, Wasserstein Women," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 37, November 14, 1994, pp. 129-31.

[In the following excerpt, Franklin favorably reviews Love! Valour! Compassion!, focusing on the play's structure, characters, and themes.]

The eight characters in Terrence McNally's new play, Love! Valour! Compassion! (terrible! title!), which just opened at his longtime theatrical home, the Manhattan Theatre Club, all happen to be gay, but they connect in ways that almost any nuclear family would envy. Most of them have a long history with each other—they have slept together, roomed together, worked together—and their relationships are rich and resonant. This is no uncomplicated idyll, though: some real ugliness comes out in the course of the play, and there are a number of betrayals, large and small. Yet in this beautifully written work McNally and his actors, under the direction of Joe Mantello, present humbling evidence of what...