Critics have compared some of McNally's plays, particularly those like Love! Valour! Compassion! and Lips Together, Teeth Apart that develop through conversational dialogue rather than significant action, to those by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Read one of Chekhov's major plays, perhaps The Cherry Orchard or The Seagull, and compare and contrast Chekhov's style of contemporary realism with McNally's. Consider such things as narrative voice, plot structure, development of characters, and how each author treats important themes in his work.

A prominent subject in Love! Valour! Compassion! is AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Buzz is HIV-positive and struggling to contain his symptoms. James shows the telltale lesions that appear in the advanced stages of the disease. Both men die not long after the play ends, and all who live on are touched again and again by the emotion and destruction the disease...