`LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION!' CRAMPED, BUT STILL CRISP.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

Take seven gay men (eight if you count identical twins) and turn 'em loose in a rambling upstate New York cottage over three summer holiday weekends.

Add generous quantities of wit, pathos and sexual tension. Throw in a lake and a diving platform suitable for erotic liaisons. Then set the entire Arcadian outing against the ominous backdrop of the AIDS crisis.

What you've got is ``Love! Valour! Compassion!'' the movie version of Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play about the search for honesty and brotherly love in an age of painfully diminished expectations.

In one sense, the project is a big risk. In another, it's a can't-miss.

It already has a built-in audience from the play's highly decorated Broadway run. The cast, which includes most of the Broadway originals, plus Jason Alexander's sweetly benign presence to reassure Middle America (a la ``The Birdcage''), has talent to spare.

And McNally lately seems to have acquired the Midas touch. Besides the ``L'' screenplay and his string of stage hits, the New York playwright also did the book for the ``Ragtime'' musical that opens here next month.

Scene by scene, one tender encounter or tortured confession at a time, ``L'' runs smoothly enough. Like the play, the movie is no structural masterpiece but rather an engaging succession of monologues, character studies and spirited ensemble pieces laced together by the aging dancer Gregory Mitchell (Stephen Bogardus), our graciously mellow narrator and host.

Gregory gets lonely at his weekend digs, so he fills up the space with interesting friends like Buzz (Alexander), a flamboyant, HIV-positive Broadway-musical fanatic; longtime white-collar companions Perry (Stephen Spinella) and Arthur (John Benjamin Hickey); and Gregory's blind boyfriend, Bobby (Justin Kirk).

Two other guests have turned up for Memorial Day weekend: John Jeckyll (John Glover), Gregory's sneeringly anti-social British collaborator; and John's latest flame, Ramon (Randy Becker), a young Puerto Rican dancer whose smoldering presence throws his elders into a tizzy.

As the summer rolls on, the group is joined by John's twin brother, James, dying of AIDS and every bit as fey and saintly as John is hard and malevolent (Glover's split-personality portrayal is amazing).

Now the bad news. Heavy script-editing makes some key transitions fall flat. Despite director Joe Mantello's remarkably poised film debut, and McNally's attempts to open up his story for the screen, the low-budget ``L'' looks and feels cramped. Largely confined indoors, the movie grows airless and overcontrolled, something out of a Jane Austen novel rather than a Walt Whitman poem. It sorely misses the primal-scream release that only live theater can provide.

Still, McNally's dialogue can be so ferociously honest and funny, and the performances are so uniformly fine, that you may not care. ``L'' probably represents the high-water mark of so-called ``gay theater'' - that is, theater by gay writers that appeals to largely gay audiences as exercises in cultural self-affirmation.

It's much more than that, of course. But it serves as a marvelously wise and impassioned swan song for a genre that McNally has helped make almost obsolete.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Love! Valour! Compassion!'' (R; language, nudity).

The stars: Jason Alexander, John Glover, Stephen Spinella, Stephen Bogardus.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Joe Mantello. Adapted by Terrence McNally from his play. Cinematography by Alik Sakharov. Released by Fine Line Features.

Running time: One hour, 55 minutes.

Playing: At selected theaters, including Hollywood Cineplex Odeon, Landmark's Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinema in West Los Angeles, Laemmle's Monica and Los Feliz 3.

Our rating: Three Stars.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Stephen Bogardus, left, Justin Kirk, John Glover, John Benjamin Hickey, Jason Alexander and Randy Becker in ``Love! Valour! Compassion!''