A plan to stage an American theater company’s gay-themed play in Moscow, with support from the United States government, has stalled amid tensions between the two nations and at a time of Kremlin hostility toward homosexuality.

The Moscow New Drama Theater, a well-regarded company in Russia, had been planning to present the 1997 play, “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” this fall, with a company of Russian actors directed by the play’s writer, Moisés Kaufman, who is the artistic director of the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project. But Mr. Kaufman said he had recently been informed by New Drama Theater that the Russian government had barred the Moscow company from accepting foreign funds for artistic productions, prompting indefinite postponement of the collaboration.

Mr. Kaufman said he believed the real issue was the subject of the play, which is a dramatization of court transcripts from the 1895 prosecutions of Wilde, an Irish writer accused of sexual relationships with men. The play has been staged in New York and Los Angeles; writing in The New York Times, the critic Ben Brantley called it “absolutely gripping” and “the must-see sleeper of the Off Off Broadway season.”

“The opportunity to re-enact the Oscar Wilde trials in Moscow at this time would have been incredibly relevant, and also would have led to the kind of dialogue that is so sorely needed there at this time,” Mr. Kaufman said. He said he always knew there was a risk that at some point the Russian government would seek to squelch the project, but that he did not expect it to be so early; the Russian company was to begin rehearsals in August, and performances were planned for October.