The title may be both a statement and a provocation, but it's also the most full frontal thing about Joe DiPietro's modern-day version of La Ronde, set among New York's gay community. Here, the fumbling gay encounter of soldier Steve, who resolutely insists that he is straight, with male prostitute John, is the first of 10 couplings that make up a daisy chain of sexual encounters. The interest in DiPietro's script – which may not be the best play ever written, but is still pretty watchable in Phil Willmott's canny production – is that each of these encounters is as much about negotiations and transactions of the emotional variety as it is about the exchanging of bodily fluids. We see the characters about to have sex, we see them straight after sex, in one case wiping the semen away, but we never see them having sex.
Often, these negotiations are of a financial nature. Steve tries to get a discount from John on the grounds that he is likely to be killed in Iraq soon; Marco, a tutor, pockets the money left by a randy college kid's parents to give extra lessons in English before allowing himself to be seduced by their son; Jack sets up Ryan, the porn star, in his own private love nest; Sammy the nerdy fringe playwright talks of high-flown principles but sells the story of his encounter with a married, closetted Hollywood actor to the tabloids. Yet in almost all of these cases, although the transaction is in dollars, the currency is love and the longing for intimacy and a word of kindness in a world of casual sex.
It seems to be very hard to write about gay men's sex lives without invoking stereotypes, and DiPietro doesn't avoid the pitfalls here, whether it is the horny self-obsessed college kid who insists that he is bisexual, the middle-aged "married" couple who live in comfortable companionship but look for sexual excitement elsewhere, or the gay porn star who turns out to be an angel of sensitivity and kindness. But the acting is often of a quality that disguises many of the deficiencies in the script, and you can't argue with DiPietro's suggestion that while it's casual sex that makes the gay man's world go round, it's love and intimacy that rocks it.
