Gay pride and passion are alive in six new shows

As far as I know, February, March and April have not been designated gay-men's history months. But you wouldn't know that from our theaters.

From this week until the official end of the spring season, New York will have six major productions - on Broadway and off - that examine human conflict through the specific prism of gay life and love.

THE LINEUP

On Tuesday, Hugh Dancy and Ben Whishaw open at MCC Theater in the American premiere of "The Pride," a British play that contrasts gay life in 1958 and 2008. (Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Hudson St., 212-279-4200, mcctheater.org.)

Next Sunday is a revival of Mart Crowley's 1968 "The Boys in the Band," the controversial father of mainstream gay theater. The drama, about grim self-recriminations at an increasingly vicious birthday party, will be revived by the adventurous Transport Group in a "site specific" environment of a faux apartment / Chelsea loft. (The Penthouse, 37 W. 26th St., 212-352-3101; transportgroup.org.)

On Feb. 24 is the opening of "Yank!," a new World War II-era pop musical about soldiers in the days before anyone was arguing about "don't ask, don't tell." (York Theatre Company at the Theatre at St. Peter's, 619 Lexington Ave., 212-935-5820; yorktheatre.org.)

On Feb. 28 is the commercial transfer of Jon Marans' "The Temperamentals," last summer's hit about the preStonewall gay political movement that included activist Harry Hay and designer Rudi Gernreich. Temperamentals was code for "homosexuals" in the early '50s. (New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St., 212-239-6200; thetemperamentals.com.)

March 11 is Broadway moving day for "Next Fall," the Naked Angels' summer hit in big-time transfer. This is Geoffrey Nauffts' drama about religious differences in a committed gay couple. Elton John recently joined in as a producer. (Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W. 44th St., 212-239-6200; nextfallbroadway.com.)

Finally, a revival of "La Cage Aux Folles" opens April 18, in another vest-pocket production by London's Menier Chocolate Factory. Kelsey Grammer co-stars in Jerry Herman's 1983 musical about family values in a French transvestite nightclub. (Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St. 212-239-6200; telecharge.com.)

AND NOW, THE QUIZ

What do these six productions have in common, besides the obvious gender identifications? The answer may stun you. It certainly stuns me.

For the first time since 1985, it appears that none of these gay plays is even remotely about AIDS. Certainly, the contemporary ones may mention the disease in passing. But the explosion of plague-art drama that began 25 years ago with Larry Kramer's furious "The Normal Heart" and William Hoffman's poignant "As Is" may have burned itself out.

No one would be stupid enough to suggest that AIDS has lost the meaning that galvanized Tony Kushner's great two-part "Angels in America" in 1993-94, or the bittersweet music that evolved into William Finn's "Falsettos" cycle in 1992 or the acid grace of Terrence McNally's Chekhovian "Love! Valour! Compassion!" in 1994. Such astonishing theater took root in the dark soil of the cataclysm, a definable body of AIDS dramatic literature that both depleted and energized the theater in the years between "Normal Heart" and its stunning 20th anniversary revival at the Public Theater in 2004.

But look at this season of gay plays - four new works, two revivals. Are they saying, perhaps, that the subject - as alarm bell, mourning bell and everything in between - has worn itself out as dramatic material? Is this callous? Frivolous? Is it presumptuous to think that, just maybe, AIDS hijacked lives and conversations so completely for so long that playwrights - and audiences - are looking to recapture the subjects left behind by the crisis?

Jon Maran, a 1996 Pulitzer finalist for "Old Wicked Songs," wrote "The Tempermanetals" as both vital history and a real love story. But he does not shy away from acknowledging the importance of civil rights in his fascinating play. "We finally have an African-American president," he says. "With that relative success, other groups' rights are finally moving up to the front burner."

At a panel last week, playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell said "The Pride" is about how "gay identity evolves from one generation to another." Director Joe Mantello - not incidentally, an unforgettable star of "Angels" and the director of "Love! Valour! Compassion!" - talked about the play in terms of "an inheritance of shame."

Of course, "Boys in the Band" has long been considered the granddaddy of shame and gay self-loathing. It really wasn't until "Torch Song Trilogy" that gay life was celebrated - at least in front of mainstream audiences. Playwright-actor Harvey Fierstein began developing his irrepressible autobiographical epic in the mid '70s. When it became a huge Tony-winning hit in 1982, he declared himself the first "real-life, out-of-the-closet queer on Broadway."

"La Cage," for which Fierstein wrote the book, opened on Broadway in 1983 and, for a moment, artists were writing love songs for the people they had always meant to sing them. But the joyful, comfortable sexuality was short-lived. By the time other art forms began to acknowledge the new reality, theater was well into a second generation of AIDS plays.

The new work treated the disease as a terrible backdrop, a given. Just as AIDS had turned candor about sexual orientation into a moral imperative for many gay playwrights, the political and social ramifications of AIDS pulled the American theater from the confines of domesticity and splashed it onto a canvas too big to hang on a parlor wall.

So welcome, perhaps, to the third generation of gay theater - one that goes back to discover history and moves forward to take stands on ongoing issues. Jack Cummings III, director of "The Boys in the Band," says the current national debate about gay marriage and gay military service clearly demonstrates we "are a nation that does not fully accept gay men and women - and that is one of the issues that the play so passionately addresses."

I can't stop thinking about Robert Chesley, who wrote rough, raw, gut-wrenching plays called "Jerker" and "Night Sweats" in the early '80s and died of AIDS, at 47, in 1990. In 1987, at a forum about theater's role in AIDS education, Chesley said, half-joking, "If I don't deal with AIDS, I would have to write history plays." Someone is writing them now.