“You wanna get married?” says the school librarian, breathing heavily, to the handsome Korean War veteran at what is clearly the beginning of a beautiful relationship. This is not quite a Barbara Cartland moment, given its context in “Some Men,” the surface-skimming, hit-and-miss new comedy by Terrence McNally that opened last night at the Second Stage Theater.
The setting is a gay bathhouse in the mid-1970s, a place and time when men were known to ask men to do all sorts of things, but marrying was usually not one of them. Yet the question — “You wanna get married?” — is more than frivolous, and it echoes throughout “Some Men.”
Frivolous was definitely the mood when Mr. McNally visited the baths before. “The Ritz,” his first Broadway success, was a farce that threw a heterosexual man (on the run from mobsters) into a homosexual bathhouse and watched him squirm. Mainstream audiences tended to leave “The Ritz” with the impression that gay men were wittier, better built, more sexually active and better versed in musicals and movies than most folks.
(Keep Reading- NewYorkTimes)
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