THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

What we see as we enter the auditorium hints at a shabby apartment in New York's West Village. After our eyes adjust to the dim light, we notice the men curled up in sleep like affectionate puppies on the one narrow bed. When they awake to ask each others' names, the more youthful of the pair proclaims his name to be Jim (whose pronounced Southern accent immediately identifies him as a tourist in the city), while Mike—at 35, the older—is revealed as the stranger he met the evening preceding. Oh—and did I mention they're both naked?

Despite Jim's inexperience with spontaneous hook-ups, they proceed to get further acquainted over wine, fruit, dope, poppers and evocative music on an old-school phonograph and newfangled tape deck. They are interrupted for a short time by Mike's queenly chum, Biddie, who drops in for a cup of tea and what could be the start of a three-way, if not for the interference of a suddenly protective Mike. When the two lovers-for-the-night are once more alone, Mike proposes experimenting with BDSM fetishwear—an offer that Jim embraces eagerly.

You could check these elements off a list under the heading "Live-Action Sim-Sex Erotica"—the urbane libertine, the country-bred neophyte, the jaded courtesan, the inventory of period motifs and tchotchkes as introduced 15 years earlier in John Rechy's City of Night. In order to fully appreciate the value of a scenario reading nowadays like an abbreviated 9 1/2 Weeks, however, playgoers must imagine the impact of Cal Yeomans' candid depiction of man-on-man seduction on post-Stonewall audiences in 1979, only two years after The Sexual Outlaw became a rallying cry for liberation of the "homosexual underground."

It might have been possible to mock this lost chapter in gay literature, a la Reefer Madness, but director David Zak and the cast assembled for this Pride Films And Plays production (appearing in conjunction with National Pastime Theater's Naked July Festival) approach the superannuated material with a respect that never coagulates into museum-piece stuffiness. Kris Hyland and Chris Kossen lend their respective archetypes an easy grace to put audiences at their ease, as does Jamie Smith in the role of the Proust-quoting Biddie, infusing Yeoman's tour of his subculture with dignity as intense as its sensuality.