Hugh Dancy and Ben Whishaw in a scene from The Pride
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)

British film stars Hugh (The Jane Austen Book Club, Evening) Dancy and Benjamin (Bright Star, Brideshead Revisited) Whishaw have been enticed to make their Off Broadway debuts in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s London hit, The Pride, in its American stage premiere. Part of a new trend of time-traveling dramas, The Pride introduces us to two sets of characters who share the same names, one set in 1958 and the other in 2008.

The play traces with great subtlety the changes in same-sex relationships and those around them in the course of those tumultuous fifty years. Beautifully directed by Joe Mantello, The Pride manages to get under your skin with its understatement and perceptive handling of a complex topic.

The play opens in 1958 when Sylvia (played by Andrea Riseborough), an illustrator, introduces her husband Philip (Dancy) to Oliver (Whishaw), the children’s book author for whom she is working. Oliver, who leads a discreet gay life, is immediately drawn to Philip with whom he feels a kinship. In fact, Philip is a repressed gay man who has affairs but has denied his feelings throughout his life. Sylvia, a former actress, who gave up her career to be an at-home wife, has sensed that something is wrong in her marriage and that Oliver and Philip have something in common.

The play segues to 2008 where a latter day Philip (again Dancy) is moving out of his long-term relationship with Oliver (again Whishaw) due to Oliver’s flagrant promiscuity which he is unable to control. Both are mutual friends of Sylvia (again Riseborough), an actress who has just found what she thinks is true love with a new boyfriend, and who originally brought Philip and Oliver together. Although Oliver deeply loves Philip, he has been unable to remain faithful to a monogamous relationship. The thrill of promiscuous sex is too much of a turn-on for him to give it up.

Alternating between the two stories and two time frames, the play shows us what a same-sex relationship was like fifty years ago and how that same relationship would be different now. The 1958 couple begin a relationship (which wife Sylvia only suspects), but Philip is too repressed to deal with his latent desires even if it costs him both wife and lover. The 2008 couple is undone by the very freedom available to them, even with their close friend Sylvia attempting to patch things up.

In his American debut, playwright Campbell has made things initially difficult for his audience by giving both sets of characters the same names. The segues from one era to another are at first extremely subtle – a passing reference to the internet, for instance. Additionally, all of the scenes in the first act take place on the same living room set, shifting between Philip and Sylvia’s house in 1958, and Philip and Oliver’s apartment in 2008.

Once, however, the alternating eras are established, the play remains consistent to its pattern. Mattie Ullrich’s costumes are also a shrewd hint to the shifting time periods. David Zinn has designed the stage so that whichever actor makes his first entrance in any episode can be seen in the distance or behind a glass wall long before he appears on stage, as though having traveled from a vast expanse of time or space.

The play is an investigation into gay identity, British style, and is extremely English in that the characters almost always maintain their reserve even when discussing their most intimate feelings. The 1958 scenes are handled drawing room style, while the 2008 scenes have a contemporary energy to them.

The title refers to both the Gay Pride Parade that the characters in 2008 are all planning to attend, while Oliver in the 1958 section talks to Philip of the pride he feels in being able to at last find his true identity when they have come together. The play’s ending at the parade suggests not only progress that things have changed in society, but that the characters are on the way to finding what they seek.

Aside from the theme and the plotting, it is fascinating watching the actors play variations on the same characters fifty years apart. Both of Dancy’s Philips are men searching for love but within limits that constrain them. Whishaw’s Oliver suffers rejection in both halves, in 1958 for trying to find love with someone who is emotionally unavailable, while in 2008 his character is unable to make a permanent commitment. While both Philips are men in relationships, both bad, the Olivers then and now are outsiders looking in to worlds from which they are excluded by their own desires. Dancy exudes a kind of matinee idol charm, while Whishaw offers chameleon-like changes and revelations.

As the third corner of the two triangles, Riseborough demonstrates her range as two very different Sylvias. In the earlier story she is a woman trying to make her loveless marriage work, knowing that something is very wrong. She is ambivalent about her husband, wanting to help release him from his demons, while at the same thing not wanting to catch him in an infidelity.

In the contemporary part she is a BFF to the gay men while at the same time trying to seek her own love life as a straight woman. She eventually discovers that she can’t lead two lives, anymore than the gay men in the earlier era could. Adam James is amusing as three very contrasting characters (a doctor, a trick, a publisher) who helps round out the story.

Although Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride doesn’t tell us anything new about same-sex relationships, it reviews the healthy changes that have come about in the last fifty years in two stories with emotional depth. Joe Mantello draws refined and shrewd performances from rising film stars Hugh Dancy and Benjamin Whishaw, both appearing Off Broadway for the first time.

The Pride (through March 28)

MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212- 279-4200 or http://www.ticketcentral.org