The same day I saw “The Pride” — a play imported from England that offers a look at gay life in two eras 50 years apart — a new group called Queer Rising staged a demonstration a little more than a mile away at the Office of the City Clerk. Twenty same-sex couples tried unsuccessfully to get marriage licenses; several others were arrested after they chained themselves to the entrance.

On the stage of the Lucille Lortel Theater, the closest parallel is a gay pride parade, which Oliver (played by Ben Whishaw) dismisses as “so passé. All those tight T-shirts, all those preening queens. Anyway, what’s the point? Remind me. Is it a demonstration, a celebration or a fashion show?”

“Cynic,” his female friend Sylvia (Andrea Riseborough) replies.

Before I actually attended the play, much about “The Pride” seemed to offer the promise of a satisfying evening at the theater. It is the first play of an actor-turned-playwright named Alexi Kaye Campbell that was praised when presented in London as “a truly remarkable debut,” winning several prestigious awards. It is staged by Joe Montello, the Tony-nominated actor (for “Angels In America”) turned bankable Tony-winning director (“Wicked,” “Take Me Out”), and stars four exciting British actors, including two making their New York debut and one, Hugh Dancy, already with a sizeable number of American fans.

In some ways, “The Pride” delivers on its promise, with a theatrical craftsmanship that puts the good acting front and center. Whether you find the evening fully satisfying depends on what you hope to get out of a work of theater.

The play begins as if a proper British parlor room drama. It is 1958, Philip and Sylvia are married, he a real estate broker, she an ex-actress turned children’s book illustrator. Sylvia is working for Oliver, who writes children’s books. All three are in their mid-30’s. Sylvia has invited Oliver home to meet her husband for the first time. The two men feel something immediately, as if they already knew each other, and if their subsequent affair does not come as a surprise, in this initial encounter everything is indirect, the conversation mildly witty banter, civilized discourse.

This scene of polite conversation flows smack into a scene of a Nazi officer barking commands. It is suddenly 2008 and Oliver – a different Oliver, but the same age (in his 30’s) and played by the same actor – is about to lick the boots of this Nazi, who is really a male hustler whom Oliver has hired for a little role-play humiliation. We soon discover that the love triangle remains intact among Oliver, Philip and Sylvia, but has shifted. The Sylvia of 2008 is in fact an actress – she didn’t have to give it up when she got married as did the Sylvia of 1958 — but she is single. Oliver and Philip are the couple, but they have recently split up because of Oliver’s habit of engaging in anonymous sex.

“The Pride,” in other words, is something of a writing exercise: What would happen if three people, Oliver, Philip and Silvia had lived their prime in both 1958 and 2008? How would they be different, how the same?

The writing exercise becomes an acting exercise, as the stories in both 1958 and 2008 move forward. Here, helped along by both a playwright and a director with first-hand experience, the four performers give a lesson in the art of acting. Sometimes a subtle change in posture or facial expression is enough to let us in on which era we’re witnessing. But it is not just the technique that impresses. Ben Whishaw, whose Hamlet at age 23 was compared to those of Sir John Gielgud and Sir Lawrence Olivier, is the stand-out performer in a stand-out cast, his longing and sadness functioning like a kind of black hole of the universe, drawing us in as it vacuums up all available light. Hugh Dancy has to my mind the more difficult role of the conflicted, disapproving Philip, and if some may see the coldness that frames his intensity as the actor’s discomfort in such an explicit role — neither Philip seems all that passionate about either Oliver — I see it as a choice to show the damage (self-) inflicted on a man in denial. Andrea Riseborough holds her own as a woman who herself suffers in both eras as a result of the unmet needs of those around her, and Adam James is entertaining in three parts, two hugely comic, one chilling, that are meant to explore the difference in general attitudes towards homosexuality in the two eras.

In 1958, a well-meaning doctor could prescribe a barbaric course of aversion therapy in order to effect a cure. In 2008, a well-meaning editor of a Playboy-like men’s magazine at first blush sounds as if his attitude has shifted 180 degrees: He gives Oliver (still a writer, but not for children) an assignment to write an article about outdoor gay sex, but to angle it “kind of like gay sex for the straight man,” which he sees as making gay cool for his lusty young heterosexual readers, and thus “breaking down barriers.”

It seems clearly the playwright’s intent to suggest that whatever the greater freedoms that now exist, gay life has not necessarily improved; that gay people, once persecuted, are now patronized; that the self-loathing, sorrow and frustration of the past may manifest itself in more open but no less self-destructive ways. Indeed, things might be in a few ways worse.

Although the ending hints at something hopeful – blink and you’ll miss it – “The Pride” could just as easily be named “The Shame.” It is a downer.

It arrives in a season that offers an unusually rich choice of gay plays, including “The Temperamentals” – about Harry Hays and the founding of the 1950’s American gay rights organization The Mattachine Society, with a cast that includes Michael Urie of “Ugly Betty” as fashion designer (and secret activist) Rudi Gernreich — and “Next Fall” – which focuses on the spiritual conflicts in a same-sex relationship — both of which are getting new life after well-received productions, “Next Fall” opening on Broadway next month. There is also “Yank,” a musical about a love affair between two soldiers during World War II, which opens later this month. Then there are the odd one-person shows that pop up with some frequency, the latest to be announced being “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet”, starring Leslie Jordon, best-known as the character Beverley Leslie on “Will & Grace” (one of dozens of television series to feature regular gay characters). These new-generation takes on the subject are supplemented by revivals of familiar oldies, Mort Crowley’s seminal gay play “The Boys in the Band” opening Friday, and “La Cage Aux Folles” bound for Broadway in April. (The Signature Theater Company is reviving Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes ” next season, and there is hope that New Yorkers will eventually see Kushner’s new “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, With a Key to the Scriptures,” which premiered at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.)

Given such choices, one could argue that there is thus little danger that “The Pride” (which seems closer in spirit to the older works) will be seen as the sum total of gay life; that whatever similarities the characters have to the negative stereotypes of the past, this is an honest look by a gay playwright at a group of believable characters. Still, seeing the play brought up a memory of the scene in the 1993 movie, “What’s Love Got To Do With It,” when Angela Bassett as Tina Turner, who has just left the abusive Ike, is talking to a producer about changing her life and her career. She doesn’t want to sing the blues anymore, she says. She is through, she says, with “that old sad-sack stuff.”

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The Pride by Alexi Kaye Campbell
at Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street
Directed by Joe Mantello, sets by David Zinn, costumes by Mattie Ullrich, lighting by Paul Gallo, original music by Justin Ellington
Cast:
Hugh Dancy as Philip
Adam James as the doctor, the man, Peter
Andrea Riseborough as Sylvia
Ben Whishaw as Oliver
Running Time: 2 hours 15 minutes, including one intermission
Ticket Prices: $15 - $95 (normal price: $65, student rush: $15, under 30 yrs old: $20; premium tickets: $95.)
Through March 20, 2010