This is charming news: out actors John Glover (Smallville) and Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and Ron Rifkin, who is currently playing a gay man on Brothers & Sisters, will reprise their roles in The Paris Letter, by out playwright Jon Robin Baitz (who also created B&S) at the Los Angeles Theater Works. The trio have all performed in the play previously (Glover in the show's Off-Broadway run and Rifkin and Harris in 2004).

The play tells the story of a repressed, high-powered Wall Street type whose life is thrown into turmoil after an affair with a younger, male colleague. And given that since these gents last performed in the play one has been led to come out publicly as a gay man and another is playing one of the few gay characters on television, one can't help but wonder how it might have a new resonance. Josh Radnor (Harris's HIMYM co-star) and Patricia Wettig (B&S, thirtysomething) co-star.

It's also great to see Rifkin and Wetting working in another Baitz-penned work, particularly given his high-profile exit from the show, which is currently in production limbo due to the strike. 

Here's a great double-dip of news for you theatre fans: out television actors Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother) and John Glover (Smallville) are headed for the stage in the coming months.

Glover, who has been out for years, will be hitting Broadway to take over the role of Man in Chair (kind of the narrator) in the hit The Drowsy Chaperone. Although Glover is a theatre vet, this marks his first Broadway musical role. In a TV Guide interview, the affable actor had this to say about the recent high-profile comings-out of stars like Harris and T.R. Knight:

Good for them for daring to do that because it used to be you'd lose your job. People had to hide. I mean look at what Rock Hudson had to go through. He had to get married or else he wouldn't have had a career. I'm hoping, though, that we'll come to the time when it doesn't matter. We just say, "This is who I am," and that's that.

On the opposite coast, Broadway acting vet Harris will be making his stage directing debut with I Am Grock, a comedy by Amanda Rogers about a successful family therapist and author dealing with unexpected (and nutty) inlaws and an important media appearance.

Hats off to both gents in their ventures.