The Eros Trilogy.

The Eros Trilogy * Written by Nicky Silver * Directed by David Warren * Starring Betty Buckley, T. Scott Cunningham, and Zak Orth 

If only Nicky Silver's plays were as wild and crazy as they seem to want to be. The author of Pterodactyls and The Food Chain has made a name for himself writing plays with long operatic monologues, often by self-hating fat gay boys or their emotionally invasive mothers. So it is with The Eros Trilogy, which is not a trilogy but a long one-act preceded by two monologues and an intermission.

In Part 1 a wealthy white woman named Claire bemoans at length how grotesque the world has become now that so many people spit on the sidewalk. In Part 2 her high-strung, overweight son Philip delivers a tirade about how ugly genitals are. He recalls making out in the bathroom with a buck-toothed adolescent girl who made fun of him for getting a boner, and then he describes his infatuation with a waiter whom he follows home one night and whom, after the waiter turns him down, he hits in the head with a brick.

The somewhat more cuddly Part 3 consists of excessively intimate letters written over the course of 25 years from Miriam to her more reticent but loving gay son Roger. In these extended arias built on an accretion of tiny detail, pathology gives way to a genuinely touching exchange of confidences, yet when you pay attention the details sound generic or somehow secondhand. We're never as shocked by the characters' behavior as they are. For instance, Miriam eventually reveals that she is an alcoholic (!) and having an affair with a man who's not only married (!!) but fat (!!!).

Even the heartwarming finale, in which Roger exclaims about how lucky he is to have loved the people he's loved in his life, is borrowed from the climactic scene of Scott McPherson's play and movie Marvin's Room.

Silver really is a lucky dog, though--actors adore performing his plays. The Eros Trilogy, which played at the Vineyard Theater in New York City from January 21 through February 27, boasted no less than Betty Buckley, reigning diva for gay theatergoers, in a star turn as both Claire and Miriam. Surrounded by David C. Woolard's gorgeous clothes, Neil Patel's elegant set, and Jeff Croiter's magnificent lighting, Buckley made Silver's prose sound like Cocteau set to music by Debussy. If only ...

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