I'd had to go into the city on short notice, would be there only two complete days, phoned Arnald Bernstein who is a one-man edition of Time Out, asked him the two hot gay tickets in the city.

He told me Never the Sinner about the Leopold-Loeb case and "When Pigs Fly" a gay-gay revue and by the time I arrived he's gotten me tickets for both.

They were on the same street, 42nd or 44th way West, two modest theatres, no great awnings and entrances but both plays, playing longtime filled to capacity.

The difference: the audiences. For "Never the Sinner" the audience was overwhelmingly gay men and some gay female couples, while "When Pigs Fly" had smiling, happy, well-heeled heterosexual couples looking Tourist.

I went with my niece, a straight woman in her 30's.

She slept through most of the first act of Never the Sinner, which concerned itself -- this on a bare stage -- with the relation of Leopold and Loeb.

There was no simple linear time-sequence so that one had scenes from the trial, scenes of the hunt for the killers of the 14 year told boy the pair had murdered, alongside with scenes, some almost idyllic, of the life, the lives, the two had lived before the deed.

Of their Jewish lives there was little indication. The slight indication of "scenery" was a fixed lattice at the rear of the stage and in one of its sections a Jewish candelabra stood.

My niece had never heard of Leopold and Loeb. Of course she had been born long after the 1924 case. I had been born in 1932 eight years later but the case was famous and interest revived in the 60's with Meyer Levin's novel Compulsion and the play, later the film, made of it.

Later there was Alfred Hitchcock's Rope a movie based on a play in which the identities of the two were slightly changed (they were a male couple sharing an apartment in New York City, not in Chicago, and living with parents as Leopold and Loeb had been. And in Rope the man they killed is someone their age (they not teenagers, but in their 20's and in their careers).

Now, in this play, we have something like the Chicago of the Meyer movie/play/book but without the "other" "normal" man who is in Compulsion often the narrator and a central characters. Here it is just the two boy-men, alternately sparring and clinging together and -- like Good and Bad Angels, the Prosecutor Crowe and the (famous) defender Darrow.

But now I'd stopped asking my niece questions. I knew she could not know the name Darrow, one whose fame had reached to my generation.

I knew why she was sleeping. She had been raised on stories of women-in-jeopardy, the film industry now had a short term for it: Femjep. These two boy-men alone with their madness, the slight tinny joys of Jazz Era Chicago seeming, as they descended, to mock them, their isolation, all this failed to touch her.

But this legend of two young men trapped in a Death Dance had brought forth to watch it, a gay audience 40-odd years later.

The two actors playing the two boy-men Jason Bowcutt playing the "intellectual" Leopold, Michael Solomon playing the sharp daring Loeb were very good indeed, handsome and animated by their madness and folly.

The actor playing the Public Prosecutor, Crowe, Glenn Pannell was efficient enough, but it was Robert Hogan, mouthing the concluding speech of Darrow (reduced here to minutes as against the three days in the courtroom), which was the strongest part of the drama.

Robert Hogan, like Orson Welles in the film Compulsion made the viewer feel he was there, in the presence of a real man who looked ordinary and tired but could vanquish tyrants and monsters, the punitive justice system, the self-righteous hate-filled populace of Chicago.

And here the drama ends. A voice over tells us the pair was sentenced to "life plus 99 years".

I, and others, knew the rest of the story, Loeb being killed by an inmate who claimed he was defending himself from homosexual advances, Leopold not only surviving but working to improve the lives of the inmates, undergoing dangerous medical experiments to help fight the scourge of malaria, and later when released, going to Puerto Rico to work for the health system there. There to marry and in time to die peacefully knowing he had followed the commandments of the Talmud, to work to save lives as once he has caused a life to be lost.

A worthless "artistic" film called "Swoon" came out after Leopold's death in which he's seen in the beginning an enjoying a gay-gay life with a gay-gay crowd in old Chicago (false) and later using his capacity as health worker to exploit men (false).

How is a homosexual like a Jew? You can say anything about them and the lies will be believed.

Jews and Homosexuals, as the play has shown are like human beings. They can slip and fall and only G-d can separate the sin from the sinner. We can only send the person to punishment.

But we can also remember part of them, for moments, was happy in G-d's love and even their love for each other.

Does this John Logan play have some feature the other presentations do not?

Yes.

By mixing time-frames it asks us as the drama goes to conviction, to go back beyond the trapping of the 14 year old boy to the time, only a few years before when one of them had solicited the other.

We see the pair at a party and one asks the other to let him drive the other home.

And we see the young boy-man's "satisfaction", self- satisfaction, that --as with the invitation which will lead to the young boy's murder -- this invitation is not to Death but Seduction, filled with some intense conviction that the Homosexual Act is a trick act.

And in this slight last scene (which is, in terms of times, the "first" scene) we see a terrible Fatal Step.

Proust says of the male homosexual, in loving a man he becomes like a woman.

And this play tells us that the young man, getting his partner into the car feels he's doing something wrong.

And in thinking that what he'd doing is Wrong he becomes a criminal and --ahead of him-- lies--we know --their adventure into Great Crime.

This is in playwright John Logan's work. And no other. Food. For thought.