1. Synopsis

2. Title and creation

3. Stage productions
    1968 premiere  Off-Broadway revivals  Broadway production 

4. Film

5. Reception and impact
    Awards 

6. References

7. Further reading

8. External links

Synopsis

The play is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the backgrounds of characters are revealed in the course of a birthday party.

• Harold celebrates his birthday. He becomes increasingly morose about losing his youthful looks and claims that he no longer can attract cute young men.
• "Cowboy", an attractive blond prostitute who is "not too bright",^[3] is one of Harold's birthday presents.
• Alan McCarthy is an unexpected party guest. Michael's married college friend,^[4] he is visiting New York and anxious to tell Michael something but hesitant to do so in front of the others. It is suggested that he once had homosexual affairs while in college, but his sexual orientation is never explicitly stated, leaving it to audience interpretation.

The party is given by Harold's six closest friends:

• Michael is Harold's "friend-enemy",^[4] the host, and a lapsed Catholic as well as an alcoholic. He is the catalyst for most of the drama of the play.
• Donald is Michael's conflicted boyfriend who has moved from the city to the Hamptons to spurn the homosexual "lifestyle", and is undergoing psychoanalysis.
• Bernard is an African-American, who still pines for the wealthy white boy in whose house his mother worked as a maid.
• Emory is a flamboyant and effeminate interior decorator. He is often campy in his sense of humor, which serves to irritate others.
• Larry, a fashion photographer who prefers multiple sex partners.
• Hank, Larry's live-in boyfriend who has been married to a woman from whom he is separated and is divorcing. He "passes" as straight and disagrees with Larry on the issue of monogamy.

During the party, the humor takes a nasty turn, as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a "game", where each man must call someone who he has loved and tell them about it. Michael, believing that Alan has finally "outed" himself when he makes his call, grabs the phone from him and discovers Alan has called his wife. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael in the end.

Title and creation

After several Hollywood film productions he was helping on were canceled, his wealthy friend Diana Lynn hired him to housesit. He lived in the Hollywood Georgian Mansion where he only had to "throw dinner parties and drink myself into oblivion." He began writing instead of drinking, and began working on The Boys in the Band. According to Crowley, he had a droll friend he periodically would take wry comments from, and based the character of Michael on.^[9]

Crowley told Dominick Dunne about the title: "It's that line in A Star is Born when James Mason tells a distraught Judy Garland, 'You're singing for yourself and the boys in the band.'"^[10]

According to Crowley, his motivation in writing the play was not activism, but anger that "had partially to do with myself and my career, but it also had to do with the social attitude of people around me, and the laws of the day." He says he "wanted the injustice of it all — to all those characters — known."^[11] Crowley has also stated, "I was not an activist, then or now. I didn't know what hit me. I just wrote the truth."^[9]

Crowley reminded himself of Michael, describing him as "a complex person who is aware of what is politically correct but has a sort of contempt for it." He called Donald "a foil for Michael"^[20] and inspired by Crowley's friend.^[8] In the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, Crowley explained, "The self-deprecating humor was born out of a low self-esteem, from a sense of what the times told you about yourself."^[12]

Stage productions

1968 premiere

While Crowley was pitching the script, early agents stayed away from the project, and it was championed by playwright Edward Albee and Richard Barr, who at the time was head of the Playwrights Units in New York.^[9] For the production, it proved "nearly impossible to find" actors willing to play gay characters.^[9] An old college friend of Crowley's, 33-year-old Laurence Luckinbill, agreed to play Hank despite warnings from his agent that it would end his career, even though the agent was herself a lesbian. It was proved hard for Crowley find producers and theater owners who were interested.^[25]

The play premiered Off-Broadway on April 14, 1968, at Theater Four,^[13] and closed on September 6, 1970, after 1,001 performances.^[20] Directed by Robert Moore, the cast included Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan McCarthy, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard. The play was one of the first works to present a story centered on homosexuals.^[14] In 1968, although only originally scheduled to run for five performances at a small venue off Broadway, it was a fast success and was moved to a larger theater. It went on to have a run in London as well.^[15] According to the New York Times, the premier's actors such as Laurence Luckinbill drilled a hole in the set so they could spy on whoever was in the house's best seats, and in the initial weeks, saw Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev, and New York mayor John Lindsay.^[16] Despite the success of the play, all the gay members of the original company stayed in the closet after the premiere.^[16] Between 1984 and 1993, five of the gay men in the original production (as well as director Robert Moore and producer Richard Barr) died in the ensuing AIDS epidemic.^[16]

Off-Broadway revivals

The play was revived Off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 1996, running from August 6

to October 20.^[17]

In 2002, Crowley wrote The Men from the Boys, a sequel to the play, which takes place 30 years after the original. The Men from the Boys premiered in San Francisco in 2002, directed by Ed Decker,^[19] and was produced in Los Angeles in 2003.^[20]

A revival went on stage in London in October 2016, as the first revival in two decades. It received a positive review from The Observer. It starred Mark Gatiss as Harold.^[21]

Broadway production

A Broadway production of The Boys in the Band, directed by Joe Mantello, opened in previews at the Booth Theatre on April 30, 2018, officially on May 31, and ran until August 11. This production, staged for the 50th anniversary of the play's original premiere, starred Matt Bomer, Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto and Andrew Rannells, as well as Charlie Carver, Brian Hutchison, Michael Benjamin Washington, Robin de Jesús, and Tuc Watkins.^[22][23] Quinto portrayed Harold, whose birthday sets the premise.^[24] All of the actors who were in the 2018 production are openly gay.^[25]

Film

The play was adapted into a feature film of the same name by Cinema Center Films in 1970, directed by William Friedkin.^[26]

Reception and impact

When The Boys in the Band premiered in 1968, mainstream audiences were shocked.^[27] The play was profiled in the William Goldman book A Candid Look at Broadway, an account of the 1967-68 season. In the same year, a two-disc, vinyl LP set was released, containing the full dialogue of the play voiced by the original actors. Crowley wrote the sequel The Men from the Boys.

In 2002, Peter Filichia from Theater Mania contended that the play's original production helped inspire the 1969 Stonewall riots and gay rights movement.^[28]

In 2004, David Anthony Fox from Philadelphia City Paper praised this play, its one-liners, and its live performance in Philadelphia. He rebutted criticism that the play portrayed "urban gay men as narcissistic, bitter, shallow".^[29]

In 2010, Elyse Summer in her review for CurtainUp called it a "smart gimmick" full of dated "self-homophobic, low self-esteem characters".^[18] In the same year, Steve Weinstein from the Edge website called it "Shakespearean".^[30]

Awards

• Cliff Gorman (as Emory) won the 1968 Obie Award, Distinguished Performance
• David Greenspan (as Harold) won the 1997 Obie Award, Performance.

References

Further reading

• {{cite book | last=Lambert | first=Gavin | title=Natalie Wood: A Life | edition=First | location= | publisher=Backstage Books | year=2005 | isbn=0-8230-8829-4}}

External links

• {{iobdb show | Boys in the Band}}
• [https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/the-boys-in-the-band-516746 The Boys in the Band at the Internet Broadway database]

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