The Last Sunday in June

"Who needs another gay play?" asks a character in "The Last Sunday in June." "These days we're Must-See TV." Jonathan Tolins' new comedy at the Rattlestick Theater is an affectionate, thoughtful and funny tribute to "gay theater," quotation marks very much the playwright's.

“Who needs another gay play?” asks a character in “The Last Sunday in June.” “These days we’re Must-See TV.” Self-consciousness is increasingly the fashion in other media — see “Far From Heaven” or “Adaptation” — so it’s hardly a surprise to see it cropping up onstage, too. Jonathan Tolins’ new comedy at the Rattlestick Theater is an affectionate, thoughtful and funny tribute to “gay theater,” quotation marks very much the playwright’s.

Trading on the perennial popularity of plays in which a crop of gay men, variously emotionally healthy but quip-ready to a man, “laugh through the pain of being reviled,” as the analyst of the genre here puts it, the playwright seeks both to honor this staple of middlebrow theater and, just occasionally, to subvert it. He does so by applying the formula first introduced by Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band” more than three decades ago — thence an entire genre, who knew? — to contemporary issues bedeviling more recent generations of gay men.

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Performed by a skilled cast under the nimble direction of Trip Cullman, the play glides along smoothly on gentle waves of glib but clever jokes, cresting the occasional carefully plotted emotional whitecap. It remains happily hemmed in by the self-imposed format, it’s true, but it will certainly please the audiences at whom it is aimed, the masses of gay, urban, white men who are almost exclusively represented onstage. (The self-segregating aspect of the culture in question is much remarked-upon here, although not, oddly, in racial terms.)

The setting is a one-bedroom apartment on Christopher Street, cleverly appointed by set designer Takeshi Kata with details that bespeak complacent gay domesticity: the opera CDs, the cheap but chic furniture sold by the ton by urban design emporiums, the juicer that is later recruited to act as a truth sensor for comic effect. The play takes place on the day referred to in the title; the apartment of young schoolteacher Michael (Johnathan F. McClain) and his boyfriend Tom (Peter Smith), a lawyer, is recruited by their friends as a convenient lookout post for boy-watching as the annual pride parade rolls by. Michael’s plans to spend the day at Crate & Barrel — “I’m over the rainbow,” he says scornfully, by way of explaining his lack of interest in marching — are put aside when the doorbell starts ringing and, one by one, a neatly assorted set of types assembles for an impromptu party that evolves gradually, through a series of cheerful contrivances, into a group consciousness-raising session.

The elder statesman is Charles (Donald Corren), the opera-lover whose distance from the culture represented by the younger men can be gauged by the sweater tossed across his shoulders (so early ’80s). The youngster is the giddy young Joe (David Turner), just out of college and happily in thrall to the pleasures of cruising men in the gay ghetto. But he’s already on the treadmill of the competitive sexual ethos of his chosen culture: He’s got a trainer and is taking supplements to “bulk up” his naturally thin frame. The older Charles, meanwhile, laments the indignity of cruising in one’s 40s.

“Not to mention one’s 50s,” cracks the acerbic Brad (Arnie Burton). The sharpest slinger of wisecracks, he’s laughing through the pain of being HIV-positive and losing a lover to AIDS. “I take 31 pills a day, including Ambien, Paxil and Altoids,” he jokes. The late arrival of Scott (Matthew Wilkas), the “shirtless hunk” endemic to all such plays, invokes another of Tolins’ winking references to the genre he’s both celebrating and deconstructing (“Who else would we put on the poster?”). In this case, the hunk is a casual friend of Peter’s who turns out to have a surprising connection to Michael, too.

The banter about boys and toys darkens midway through the play with the arrival of Peter’s ex-boyfriend James, who announces that he’s decided to get married — to a woman (gasp!). Played with wonderful, scowling intensity by Mark Setlock (“Fully Committed”), James is the catalyst for a series of surprising and not so surprising revelations, not to mention various heartfelt or humorous reflections on the glories and the pains of the hidebound culture being examined. James begins by aggressively announcing that he’s “getting out” of the world of which the rest of the characters are so happily, unquestioningly a part. “I don’t belong,” he says, while admitting that years of attempting to have left him emotionally drained and full of self-loathing.

James attacks the ethos that prizes sexual attractiveness above all other qualities and laments that it has spread outward from the gay community to the culture at large: “We won,” he says. “Cute boys rule the world.” Thousands of once-alienated kids have grown up to find comfort in their common goals — in the “post-gay” 21st century, this means not securing civil rights but having lots of sex — but in doing so they’ve created an insular world that alienates outsiders just as ruthlessly as the jocks in high school. When James’ fiancee Susan (Susan Pourfar, in a sharp but delicate turn) is brought into the picture (the boys are planning a gay “intervention”), she, too, proves a savvy analyst of a culture that encourages its adherents to reduce themselves to slavish pursuers of romantic and sexual satisfaction: “As soon as we graduated from college, all my gay friends turned into all the girls I couldn’t stand in my seventh-grade homeroom,” she wryly observes.

Through characters that conveniently wear their attitudes on their sleeves — unless, of course, their arms are sufficiently developed for tanktops — Tolins astutely and often wittily anatomizes the anxieties that plague the more sensitive members of his tribe. (The cynical Michael admits he “doesn’t like” gay men — he just likes to have sex with them.) But he is guilty of manipulating his characters for dramatic effect or in order to pursue a topic: It hardly makes sense that Brad would blurt out a secret calculated to undermine the relationship between Michael and Tom in one scene, then express despair at the idea of their breaking up a few minutes later, even if the revelation has led to a provocative conversation about monogamy and the phenomenon of cybersex.

And amusing as it is, the play is limited in its depth and slightly claustrophobic. Even as it questions the shallow attitudes of its characters and their shared culture, it also celebrates and, one could argue, inculcates them, by pandering to its audience. Tolins ultimately refuses to break free from the confines of the format he’s exploiting, which resembles the general recipe for most sitcoms. The witty aside reigns supreme in ways that are often dramatically false: a waspish tongue becomes a prize second only to a washboard stomach. And the carefully measured doses of speechifying also reduces his characters to two dimensions.

The play ends on a bleak note that consciously subverts the current standards of the genre (“Gay plays end happily now”). The apparently contented couple Tom and Peter are on the verge of parting after discovering the limits of their commitment. But the emotional impact is minimal: The play has been trading not in flesh-and-blood characters but carefully constructed, comically acknowledged facsimiles. Tears are hard to earn when you put a premium on self-consciousness — the audience gets infected with the attitude, too.

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