Call it a collage, a mural, a meditation, a dramatized essay. Terrence McNally's Some Men is many things, some of them insightful or touching or enjoyable. But a coherent, concise play it is not.

Nearly any other McNally work you could name -- Love! Valour! Compassion! or Master Class or Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune spring to mind -- is a better play. But as the new production of Some Men at the Rising Action Theatre in Oakland Park demonstrates, the script has enough flashes of McNally's creative craftsmanship that it largely holds up, even given the uneven talents of its cast.

Directed by Rising Action artistic director David Goldyn with an assist from Jerry Jensen, the 2006 play looks at gay life in and near New York from 1922 to the present. By roaming back and forth through history, McNally can present archetypes -- some would say stereotypes -- and through them reflect the evolution of gay men's lives and attitudes.

We meet the grieving military man who isn't asked but can't resist telling his dead lover's father the truth about their relationship. We listen to a drag queen singing a sorrowful Over the Rainbow as an iconic Judy Garland lies resplendent at a funeral home and the Stonewall uprising is stirring outside a Greenwich Village piano bar. We watch grieving, angry, conflicted men sitting in a hospital waiting room as AIDS is killing those they love. We observe a married father nervously giving himself over to lust and personal truth with a brainy hustler in a room at the Waldorf Hotel.

With so many settings, eras and characters (each of the eight actors plays multiple roles), it's lucky that McNally thought of using vaudeville-style placards to announce the location and year of each scene. A powerhouse cast with more elaborate sets and costumes might make that unnecessary, but Rising Action isn't blessed with those things.

The strongest performance comes from Larry Williams, who plays the closeted married guy, a wealthy '20s Wall Street type who's romancing the family chauffeur and a cheeky British bartender. Williams easily differentiates his characters and simply sets a standard that most of his fellow actors can't achieve.

Author David Leddick does some of his best-ever stage work as Archie, the tart-tongued drag queen, and Scoop, the droll half of a longtime couple. Joseph Long has a poignant turn as ''Angel Eyes,'' a 1932 Harlem performer who claims that his ''secret'' lover Lorenz Hart wrote the lyrics to Ten Cents a Dance for (and about) him. Long, however, needs to work on both his delivery and interpretation of lines.

Larry Brooks, Ted Dvoracek, Daniel Lugo, John Hernandez and a hunky Ricardo Rodriguez (who gets fully nude with Williams during the hotel hustler scene, a gift to the prurient in the audience) juggle and sometimes struggle with their many characters. Were they better actors, and had McNally known when to stop writing -- the script is too long by at least a half hour -- Rising Action's Some Men would be a more dramatically satisfying experience.

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