This is a play Lance, and I discussed not long before his heart attack. He hadn't been to New York in several years, so he never got to see Nathan Lane eat the entire play, cast and all. My point was that if he liked it, and he did like it, he should do it.
It was difficult to talk to Lance about gay issues as a practical matter. "It wouldn't be accepted." "Some would consider it scandalous." For a mid-century marvel like himself, Lance could sometimes act like a Victorian grandmother.
When Lance was uncomfortable, he would set his jaw and look side to side rather than straight on. He tapped his cane into the ground and twisted it like a wood awl. "You know, John Taylor died of this," Lance said. John Tyler is a made-up name. I'm sorry. He was a real person. A person both Lance I knew. A real person who never taught at Millsaps but had attended Millsaps and worked closely with Millsaps and died of aids. Love! Vallor! Compassion! is an aids play.
When I looked it up a few moments ago, something like seven hundred thousand men have died of aids since I was a freshman at Millsaps. That's not a lot when you consider all men in America. It's a lot more when you're starting with a group that's already only ten percent of the population. If you're in my generation, in the arts almost at any capacity, that's one, two, three, several people you knew or worked with. Within a demographic group, it's a plague of biblical proportions. There are treatments now. Most people live through aids now. They're talking about how some people are actually cured now. There was a time, though, when in a certain demographic group, you knew you were going to have to say goodbye to some people you loved while they were very young, only you didn't know who.
It's ironic that the disease that was literally killing gay men in America was also the catalyst that made them more visible than they have been since Victoria sent Oscar Wilde to jail for it. Rock Hudson had aids. Liberace had aids. Elizabeth fucking Taylor spread out her hands and spoke of aids.
"I can't cast it," Lance said
That may not have been a lie. Every cast call he ever had, there were at least three times as many women auditioning as men. Finding four men willing to play gay characters at Millsaps in the Nineties would have been difficult. Finding four men willing to play gay characters who could also meet Lance's standards for acting was a genuine obstacle.
"What about Matt Henry as Buzz?" I said.
"Matt would be very good. He has that sort of energy. But would he?"
"Matt would do anything you asked him to." I said, with an emphasis on "anything YOU asked him to."
Before his heart attack, I often shared cigarettes with Lance. "Anything but Menthol." He would say. After his heart attack, I said I couldn't share anymore. "Of Course not," he said with an almost accusatory glare. I still smoked. He knew that. He would never smoke again. He knew that too. On that level, we were no longer comrades, veterans of a war he was no longer a part of.
We smoked silently, communicating with eyes and hands and whisps of translucent white air and thoughts and ideas we dared never verbalize. Lance knew I was straight. Lance knew I loved him more than nearly anyone we knew. Lance knew that I loved art more. He also knew I was willing to push boundaries; he was not.
"I do like the play," he said. "I could do it. It would be marvelous. I could do it. I'm just not ready to do it." Stalemate.
Wendy comes in and steals a piece of candy. Brent is behind her. We have a production meeting. That was the last time we ever discussed Love! Vallor! Compassion!
Lance died with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof being the closest thing to a gay play he ever produced. For a man who spent sixty years in the theater, gay or straight, that's unusual. Part of that is the difference between his generation and mine. A much bigger part of that is being born in Mississippi. On issues like race, gender, sexuality, and religion, we torture ourselves at least as much as we torture each other in Mississippi. Lance did plays on all these things with great passion and energy, all of these things except sexuality. That was a line he would not cross, but if you ever saw his productions of Cat, he got right up next to it without going over.
Tennessee Williams always included a beautiful young man in his plays, rippling with masculine power and pathos and almost always suffering. A few times, a beautiful young man past his prime but still the heart of the play. Williams fanatics, knowing how much of his work was autobiographical, spent many hours trying to connect one of Williams' men to some actual person living in the delta who might have inspired Williams. I think characters like Brick and Stanley were a way for Williams to say something about himself. About the life he would lead if he wasn't an introverted writer with a complicated family history. Lance loved producing Wiliams's plays. He did them all. He told me once he preferred them to Shakespeare, but it wasn't an easy choice.
The last play I did with Lance was Dangerous Corner by JB Priestly. Some of you were in it. A heart attack, a broken leg, and shoulder had taken much of the fire out of Lance. Normally he would do four, if not five, plays in a year. That year he did two. I told him I wanted to Stage Manage both. I said it was because we didn't have a good stage manager in the company that year. That was a lie. I wanted to stage manage these last plays because I didn't know how much longer I had with Lance. I didn't know how much longer the world would have of Lance. If these were to be his last plays, I wanted them to be the kind of experience he loved.
I wouldn't normally wait for the director to drive up and walk them to the theater when I stage manage, but I did then. Fears for his health and fears for his life made Lance often feel defeated and afraid. Not things I ever expected of him. I've seen men die before. It starts in the mind.
"I can't do it today." He said, sitting in his car seat, weeping.
"Take your time, bud. There's thirty minutes until call for the cast."
"I can't walk." He said, "I can't walk from her to the theater."
"We can stop and rest on the stoop halfway. I sit on the stoop all the time." I said.
"I hate this." Lance said.
"I do too." I said, and we went to rehearsal.
For Lance, rage against the dying of the light was something he did with fierce discretion and a fair amount of fear and doubt.
Soon after that, he'd be in an assisted living facility in another county. Soon after that, he would be no more. Lance pushed the barriers and challenged the world, but in the end, he grew weary of it, and wounded and broken, he lay down to die.
Love! Vallor! Compassion! is a play about a man with aids that helped make Nathan Lane a star. They're also words to describe a man I loved--who hung in the sky like a comet for fifty years at Millsaps and then moved further out into space.
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