The shows must go on: laugh? Cry? Sing? Plays and musicals created by gay and lesbian theater artists offer all options in the coming months, from Bea Arthur to Stephen Sondheim, from coast to coast. (theater).

Despite the economic downturn and a conservative federal government--both of which make it tougher than ever to produce daring or culturally diverse arts projects--gay and lesbian theater artists across the nation are as productive as ever. "Sexual minoritarians are the life's blood of the American theater," says Tony Kushner, whose timely examination of Afghanistan and its effect on us, Homebody/Kabul, continues its premiere run in New York and heads to Rhode Island's Trinity Repertory Company in March and the Berkeley, Calif., Repertory Theatre in April. "I suspect the real reason we are so busy producing work is, we want to make John Simon even more wretched and miserable and frightened than he already is," Kushner continues, relishing the opportunity to take a shot at the notoriously homophobic New York theater critic. "This is a laudable goal."

Among Simon's recent targets has been out playwright Edward Albee, who will follow up last year's The Play About the Baby with back-to-back premieres in New York this spring. Opening off-Broadway in February, Occupant stars Anne Bancroft in a portrait of the sculptor Louise Nevelson. In The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?--which opens in March on Broadway--Albee provocatively explores family dynamics once again. Meanwhile, the recent trend of Albee revivals continues with a Princeton, N.J., production of All Over in February and a Hartford, Conn., staging of Seascape in May.

At the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., another openly gay theater great, Stephen Sondheim, is being honored with the Sondheim Celebration beginning in May, comprising Sweeney Todd, Company, Sunday in the Park With George, Merrily We Roll Along, Passion, and A Little Night Music. As if to preface that festival, a revival of Into the Woods is playing in Los Angeles through March on its way to Broadway in April.

This season several gay and lesbian theater artists have turned to real-life characters for inspiration. Playwright Richard Greenberg's The Dazzle, about the eccentric Collyer brothers, runs off-Broadway through May, followed by a different production of the play in Chicago. In February, Alan Alda will star in QED, Peter Parnell's play about real-life physicist Richard Feynman; and lesbian director Anne Bogart will debut Room in San Francisco, drawing from the writings of Virginia Woolf. Room opens in New York in May.

Playwright Tom Donaghy describes his new play, Boys and Girls (opening in New York in May), as being about "a couple of fags and dykes who almost destroy each other in the name of love and family." By way of explaining his choice of words, he adds, "The play is a little bit of personal anthropology."

Another out writer with new work is Craig Lucas (Longtime Companion), whose This Thing of Darkness, written with David Schulner, opens in New York in May. The play is about two 22-year-old male college friends who share a birthday and, Lucas says, "in an unanticipated moment, share a rather dreamlike, even nightmare-like, vision of what the future holds."

With a nightmare-like past immediately behind them, what does Lucas think New York audiences need out of their theater experience? "There should be room for anything and everything," he says, "Either a work of art was valid, coherent, and meaningful before the bombings, in which case it should remain so, or it wasn't then and it won't be now." Nevertheless, he adds, "I don't mind the occasional piece of distraction, fluff, silliness."

Evenings with three of gay audiences' favorite divas might qualify as fine distractions. Both Bea Arthur and Elaine Stritch will have one-woman shows in New York beginning in February: Bea Arthur on Broadway, honed in a recent West Coast tryout, and Elaine Stretch at Liberty, cowritten by Stritch and John Lahr. Then in March, Kathleen Turner will return to Broadway as Mrs. Robinson in the first stage adaptation of The Graduate.

Fresh gay and lesbian talents are also emerging. New Jersey-born Victor Lodato, winner of the Robert Chesley Award for Gay and Lesbian Playwriting, has been honing his craft away from the bright lights of New York, in Arizona. He receives his most high-profile production to date in San Francisco with the February premiere of his absurdist drama The Eviction.

Twenty-six-year-old Christopher Shinn--already well-known in London--gets his biggest break so far in America with the presentation of his play Four, which just moved into a larger theater [see review, opposite] after its debut off-off-Broadway last year. Shinn, a Hartford native, studied under Kushner and cites other gay writers such as Lucas as role models. "I remember when I was 13 or 14 being in New York City and finding a collection of Terrence McNally's plays, which I bought secretly. The Lisbon Traviata was the first play about gay men I ever read. It was thrilling to know that you could do that, since there was nothing gay on TV or in the movies at that time."

Not all the out theater artists producing new work are playwrights: The gay directors who are responsible for many upcoming productions are embracing a diverse range of material. Busy Sean Mathias, who helmed the recently finished Ian McKellen-Helen Mirren Broadway run of Dance of Death, directs Sondheim's Company in the D.C. festival and a Broadway revival of The Elephant Man, starring Billy Crudup, in March. Christopher Ashley directs the new play The Smell of the Kill, a revenge comedy on Broadway in February, as well as the revivals of Sweeney Todd and Merrily in D.C.

Nicholas Hytner (The Object of My Affection), poised to take over the leadership of Britain's Royal National Theatre next year, directs the stage-musical adaptation of The Sweet Smell of Success, starring John Lithgow, on Broadway in February, while Scott Ellis directs Chris O'Donnell in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck in March. In July, Ellis will also direct the Rodgers and Hart musical The Boys From Syracuse, with a book updated by out playwright Nicky Silver.

"The balance keeps you on your toes," explains director Michael Mayer, who directed Kevin Bacon in the current Broadway production of An Almost Holy Picture, a poignant personal play about loss and faith, and will follows it with a giddy new Broadway adaptation of Thoroughly Modern Millie, cowritten by Dick Scanlan, in March. "I see the relationship with the audience like the one you have with good friends--you can have a good cry together one time and then you can just cut up the next."

Find a list of theaters where these plays will be produced at www.advocate.com

Raymond has written for The Village Voice and Harper's Bazaar.