Common Ground

This neatly packaged collection of stories by three major playwrights — Paula Vogel (How I Learned to Drive), Terrence McNally (Frankie and Johnny at the Claire de Lune) and Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy) — stumbles under the weight of its ambitious sociological scope. But it deserves credit for examining the two-sided coin of homophobia and patriotism. In the first story, set during the Korean War, impressionable WAVE Dorothy Nelson (Brittany Murphy) gets drummed out of the service on a section eight. Although her crime merely entailed a first-time visit to a gay bar, hypocritical superior officer McPherson, (Mimi Rogers) —...