Downbeat Duo

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

THE LISBON TRAVIATA

by Terrence McNally

Two gay male buddies, poised at the uneasy boundary between youth and middle age, sprawl in an overdecorated apartment and dish the dirt about opera singers. None can meet their fierce standards except Maria Callas (a performance by whom provides the play's title). They admire her for blending technique and emotion and, more deeply, for enduring a sad life and lonely death. Other artists, they say, impersonate the passion and hysterics of opera; she lived them.

One of the obsessive fans (Nathan Lane) is extravagantly camp, a walking aria of loveless lament. The other (Anthony Heald), casually straight in manner but for an occasional nervous flutter of his hands, has a thriving career as a book editor and a cozy home life with a physician. They amount to a before-and-after picture of homosexuals in the age of liberation. The campy one, very '50s, is witty but a self-denigrating cartoon; his friend, very '80s, acts relaxed even when disclosing that his relationship is turning into an "open" one. The twist in Terrence McNally's midnight-dark comedy, which opened off-Broadway last week, is that the seemingly enviable, self- possessed character lacks the emotional resources to deal with the breakup of a relationship.

When the action shifts to his minimalist pad, where he surprises his lover in bed with a boyfriend, he caroms between Noel Coward worldliness and Edward Albee combat, hinting at suicide, half attempting murder. In earlier versions of the play, the bloody pathos of opera found a parallel: the abandoned man stabbed his lover, then held him in a last embrace. That ending felt arch. This one feels anticlimactic, void of release. So does the end of an affair, an event McNally chronicles with specific detail and authentic, universal pain.