The Temperamentals

Harry Hay has always been a controversial figure. A dedicated member of the Communist Party, back when that was truly dangerous, he transferred his dialectical furor to gay rights. With a handful of pink (in both senses) fellow travelers, he founded the Mattachine Society, which, with the Daughters of Bilitis, was the only voice for American homosexuals, pre-Stonewall.

In a lengthy epilogue to The Temperamentals, Jon Marans' historical pageant about Mattachine's formative years in the early '50s and Hay's own transformation from unhappily closeted married man to out-and-proud poufter, Hay describes what happened to him. He talks about the Radical Faeries, the group he founded in the 1970s as a counterpoint to the then-dominant clone culture.

For reasons only he knows, Marans chose to gloss over some of Hay's other actvities, such as his blanket condemnation of ACT-UP because it was too butch, his long-time defense of NAMBLA, or his lifelong support for the Party. I'm not here to damn Hay. We're all complex individuals made up of many parts at war with each other.

As Marans dramatizes so well here, Hay had more demons and more complexities than most of us. Here he is shown as a man driven by the cause of social justice. Once he's realized his own sexuality is immutable - thanks largely to an affair with a clothing designer who would become far more famous than Hay - he transfers his ideological strivings from socialist revolution to a sexual one.

If The Temperamentals is a look at history through rose-colored glasses, it's still a valuable document to a lost part of our heritage. Of necessity in a historical drama, the action is episodic, sometimes discursive, not-infrequently didactic and with lots of expository dialogue to let us know where we are here and who's done what.

But thanks to two excellent lead performances and three very good supporting ones, history really does come to life. This is much more than one of those recreations in a History Channel documentary. You really walk out of the theater feeling these are flesh-and-blood characters, real people who walked the earth.

They did so at a time when holding another man's hand or even giving a glance at a public urinal was cause for arrest, public humiliation and ruination. The "Eureka!" moment here comes when Dale Jennings, a carny who is the least articulate and least literate of the group, is arrested for public lewdness in a men's washroom. Harry decides that Dale should fight the arrest, rather than accept it, as everyone else has done.

If the moment is corny (there's even an "Oath of the Horatii" laying-on of hands), it's still thrilling to see an oppressed group rise up - especially meaningful when you're a member of that group.

Marans allows a bit of nuance by having Hay's lover, Rudy Gernreich, be the more interesting of the two. A Viennese-American Holocaust survivor, Gernreich has more going on because, unlike Hay, for whom teaching seems to be little more than a way of surviving, Gernreich has a bona fide career. When he shows Hay one of his dresses, he's every bit as passionate as he is when Hay shows him what would become the founding manifesto of the Mattachine Society.

As Gernreich, Michael Urie proves he's way more than a TV actor (Ugly Betty). He makes Gernreich into a nuanced, cosmopolitan intellect-aestete, who refuses to let anything - even (or especially) his love life - get in the way of his craft. Nearly matching him is Thomas Jay Ryan, who plays Hay as a florid man of the left, spouting radical pronunciamentos one moment, mewling like a love-starred kitten the next.

Since this takes place in Los Angeles, there has to be a Hollywood legend, and here it's Vincente Minnelli. At that time, married to Judy Garland (there are some jokes about how much "the boys" all worship his wife), Minnelli here is a pinky-out aesthete who approaches politics as though it were taking place on a movie set. Granted the real-life Minnelli was totally closeted and an object of fun (he never fooled anyone, especially not his wives), I found the characterization simplistic.

Don't be scared by the fact that this recreates historical events. Marans has given us a real, honest, dramatic night in the theater. Even if no one smokes (what's up with that?), this is a fairly accurate depiction of events B.S., as Hay puts it - Before Stonewall. A history lesson was never so enjoyable.

The Temperamentals is playing an open-ended run at the New World Stages, 340 W. 50th. For tickets, call 212-239-6200 or the website.