Unusual Acts of Devotion
by Terrence McNally
Philadelphia Theatre Company, Oct. 22–Nov. 23, 2008
“YOU NEED someone to take care of you, Chick,” a neighbor advises his friend in Terrence McNally’s new play, Unusual Acts of Devotion. “Or—now hear me out—you need someone to take care of. I believe having someone to take care of makes you stronger.” Unusual Acts is McNally’s love song to New York City—both to the extraordinarily intense community that life there allows, and to the dangers from which people must protect one another.
The play’s action is simple: on a summer evening, five residents escape the stifling heat of their respective apartments on the tarred rooftop of their six-story apartment building on the Lower West Side of Manhattan where Leo (played by Michael Aronov) and Nadine (Ana Reeder) celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary with an impromptu supper. Chick (Richard Thomas), a failed actor who works as a Greyline Tour guide, has been alone since his lover Aaron, unable to bear the pain of an unspecified illness, committed suicide several years earlier. Josie (Faith Prince), recently fired as a school teacher for engaging in an affair with a teenage student, has just returned from a drug rehabilitation program. The elderly, cantankerous Mrs. Darnell (Viola Harris), widowed so long that no one in the building remembers her husband, is a thorn in everyone’s side and is included in the group only because of Nadine’s caring nature.
Sexual tensions abound. Although gay, Chick had a brief affair with Josie years earlier from which their once close friendship has never recovered. And, although happily married, Leo similarly had an affair with Josie that nearly destroyed his relationship with Nadine. Spectacularly oversexed, Leo is not above flirting with Chick. One of the play’s most complex moments— replete with homoerotic suggestions that signal, finally, quiet intimacy rather than raw desire—involves the diabetic but needle-shy Leo baring his ass for an insulin injection by Chick.
However, as Nadine observes, it’s not sex that holds a relationship together but the small accommodations we are willing to make of another person’s needs. “Nadine is right,” Josie comments. “We can make each other happy so easily and we so seldom do. Put on a CD. Close the window. Open the window. Love someone. Love someone who loves you back. We make the easy difficult, the possible not.” The acts of devotion that the friends perform for each other prove the more unusual because they are so simple. Macho Leo gently massages the painfully swollen legs of Mrs. Darnell and, sensing Chick’s need to be held, dances with him in a manner more intimate than any sex act could be. Nadine has spent the day cooking for whoever might come up on the roof that evening and stumble upon the romantic dinner she’s prepared for herself and Leo. Her love for Leo is such that she willingly shares him with others. Chick monitors the diabetic Leo’s glucose level and negotiates the latter’s fear of needles when an insulin shot is required. At the climax of the play, Josie confesses not only that she was on the roof the day that Aaron jumped to his death but also that her drug addiction developed in response to the pressure she felt in hiding from Chick the full extent of his lover’s despair, lest her friend suffer even worse pain.
“Nobody can take care of themself,” hard-eyed Mrs. Darnell stoically observes, “we just think we can.” As in his earlier, much celebrated Love! Valour! Compassion!, McNally here comments upon the need to form an intimate circle of friends and lovers when threatened by the forces of annihilation. Although 9/11 is never mentioned by the characters, a hole in the skyline where the World Trade Center towers once stood is visible from the building’s rooftop. Likewise, although AIDS is never mentioned, it seems to have been the reason that Aaron committed suicide. Throughout the play, the ominous red glow of a cigarette from a darkened corner of the roof (a deeply unsettling effect that McNally first used in his libretto for the opera Dead Man Walking) indicates the presence of a murderer (Steve Kuhl)—about whom news flashes come intermittently over the radio—who has been preying on gay men in the Village.
In such a world, McNally proposes, the most unusual act of devotion that people can pay each other is the reassuring intimacy of physical touch. It is the need to be touched that led Josie into a self-destructive affair with her teenage student, that drives Mrs. Darnell throughout the play to beg Leo to massage her swollen legs, and that allows Chick to hope that Leo will dance with him. In Love! Valour! Compassion! eight gay men had to flee the oppressive city to find comfort in each other’s company on an isolated, rural estate. In Unusual Acts of Devotion, McNally expands his vision to include straights as well as gays, the elderly and the middle-aged as well as the young, in a dance not of survival but of the simple, comforting reassurance that humans experience through touch.
Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English and coordinator of Asian Studies at the University of Central Arkansas.
