The Dying Gaul.

* Written by Craig Lucas * Directed by Mark Brokaw * Starring Tim Hooper, Tony Goldwyn, and Linda Emond

Grief and rage go hand in hand. Ask playwright Craig Lucas. He's been there. In 1995 after his lover died, the author of Longtime Companion wrote a fierce, now-famous "Postcard From Grief" (first published as a viewpoint in The Advocate and later anthologized in Gay Men at the Millennium). The same raw, scorching emotion clearly fueled the writing of his latest off-Broadway play, The Dying Gaul, set in Los Angeles in 1995 and given its inaugural production May 31-June 14 at New York City's Vineyard Theatre.

The title refers to a screenplay by Robert (Tim Hopper), whose lover and agent, Malcolm, has died of AIDS. The screenplay is about--surprise--a gay man and his lover who has AIDS. Hollywood producer Jeffrey (Tony Goldwyn) loves the script. He's already shown it to Gus Van Sant. He wants to buy it. Just a couple of things, though. For the film to reach the widest audience, the main characters can't be gay. And the title has to go. "The Dying Gaul will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be made," the producer flatly assures Robert. A man of integrity and conscience, the writer is on his way out the door when the producer mentions the sum he's willing to pay for the script. It's big. Then he mentions the stars who are interested in the leading roles. They're big too. Finally he pulls Robert into a Hollywood hug and comments on the bulge it produces in his pants, which is apparently big enough to intrigue Robert, who succumbs. After all the producer looks like, well, Tony Goldwyn.

From the setup one might think The Dying Gaul will be a fast, funny, nasty satire about gay Hollywood hypocrisy--a postcard from territory explored by Jon Robin Baitz (Mizlanskyl-Zilinsky) and David Mamet (Speed-the-Plow), among others. But the play goes somewhere else entirely. Jeffrey has kids and a wife, Elaine (Linda Emond), who's no dummy. Determined not to be shut out of whatever's going on between the two men, she tracks down Robert in an America Online chat room and pretends to be another grieving fag seeking bereavement counseling. She even goes so far as to ransack his therapist's client files and then use privileged information to pose as his dead lover, communicating with Robert from the beyond under the on-line handle "Archangel." A good half of the play takes place in the eerie virtual and artificial intimacy of cyberspace, which Robert--who's a sort of on-line Orpheus--likens to "life after death, all these disembodied souls." In this realm nothing is what it seems, and wounding sometimes masquerades as healing.

It was inevitable that cruisy chat rooms would show up in plays and movies, but remarkably Lucas incorporates cybersex, Buddhism, and closeted Hollywood homos not for their trendy currency but to explore deep spiritual questions: What is unconditional love? How do we learn to forgive ourselves? How do we live with loss? What happens to love after death? Lucas proves that these aspects of gay experience truly do have universal applications. And he does so without ever watering down his burning gay rage that, for instance, the death of an ex-princess in a car accident can trigger worldwide mounting while our own losses by comparison pile up barely noticed. Director Mark Brokaw's production is as simple, fleet, and haunting as his staging of Paula Vogel's Pulitzer prize-winning How I Learned to Drive at the same theater last year. And the performances are superb--by Emond, Goldwyn, and especially sexy and soulful Hopper, who is well on his way to becoming a legendary talent.

Shewey is editor of Out Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published by Grove Press.