Love! Valour! Compassion! and a Perfect Ganesh: Two Plays (Plume Drama)

Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: One of the most endearing plays of the 1990's, McNally reaches into the heart of the audience and never lets go. The magical thing about Love! Valour! Compassion! is that even though it details the lives of eight gay men in upstate New York, anyone, gay or stright, man or woman, can relate to it. A fine piece of drama that stands as a testament to the human soul, McNally shows us once again that life consists of successes and failures, truth and lies, and of course, love, valour, and compassion.

Rating:
Summary: an accomplishment of great beauty...
Review: PERFECT GANESH is a very well-written play but the piece that takes most of the credit here is the justly famous LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! The 8 characters are so well carved that their interaction demands attention. There is romance and true love (on many different levels) in the play, but there's also betrayal and a genuine anger at the injustices of the world (homophobia, AIDS). After an addictive reading session, you will walk away hopefully caring more than you did when you picked up this book. Investigate the film version also - it brings the drama to life.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the drama ?
Review: The best thing about "Love! Valour! Compassion!" is its technical complexity. The author goes to great lengths to make the play dynamic: forward presentation of key events, overlapping monologues and conversations, onstage transformation of John Jeckyll into James and back, complex stage design. However, after getting through all these twists and turns, one is left wondering: what is all this dynamics for ? What purpose does it serve ? The transactions between characters are trivial, and everything that happens to them is boring and predictable. The characters in the play don't live - they are engaged in self-analysis. Well thank you, but I am capable of analyzing things myself when there is something to analyze. Overall, the play's elaborate complexity only underlines the absence of real drama between the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Where's the drama ?
Review: The best thing about "Love! Valour! Compassion!" is its technical complexity. The author goes to great lengths to make the play dynamic: forward presentation of key events, overlapping monologues and conversations, onstage transformation of John Jeckyll into James and back, complex stage design. However, after getting through all these twists and turns, one is left wondering: what is all this dynamics for ? What purpose does it serve ? The transactions between characters are trivial, and everything that happens to them is boring and predictable. The characters in the play don't live - they are engaged in self-analysis. Well thank you, but I am capable of analyzing things myself when there is something to analyze. Overall, the play's elaborate complexity only underlines the absence of real drama between the characters.