In his upper eastside Manhattan apartment, Michael is throwing a birthday party for Harold, a self-awoved "32 year-old, pock-marked, Jew fairy", complete with surprise gift: "Cowboy" a street hustler. As the evening wears on, fueled by drugs and alcohol, bitter, unresolved resentments among the guests come to light when a game of "Truth" goes terribly wrong.
Through it all, the ensemble filled with out-and-proud actors is uniformly terrific. They deftly hug the curves of the script as it goes from barbed humor to bile-spewing. To his credit Crowley doesn't tie things up with a bow. 'Call you tomorrow,' says Harold, after the carnage. In other words, boys will be boys.
Seen from some vantages, it's all rainbow flags and smiley faces. The US has achieved marriage equality, for now anyway, and many people who don't identify as heterosexual no longer feel compelled to closet themselves. Aids, which postdates this play, but seems to be prefigured in its discussion of the bathhouses and an analyst who couldn't make a session because of 'a virus or something, he looked awful', continues to transform from a terminal illness into a chronic one. One of the play's producers, Ryan Murphy, an openly gay man, is pretty much the hottest thing in entertainment and the play's cast is made up mostly if not entirely of openly gay actors, including Matt Bomer and Andrew Rannells, a thing unimaginable even a few decades ago. The actors are doing strong work, though a few of them keep signaling just how strong that work is.
Videos