Two years shy of its 5oth Anniversary, Mart Crowley’s ground-breaking play The Boys In The Band has been revived for a run in London’s Park Theatre. Originally opening off-Broadway just a year before the Stonewall riots which would signal a major shift in the start of the the first throes of ‘gay liberation, although the play shocked mainstream audiences, it still ran for over 1000 performances.
The plot is of a group of thirty-something-year old closeted gay men who gather to celebrate their friend Harold’s birthday. Michael who is about to host the party with “six tired screaming fairy queens and one anxious queer” is an angry and self-loathing alcoholic who lights candles at midnight Mass and wishes that he wasn’t gay. Clive Barnes in The New York Times called it “the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on the stage” but other critics, and many in the gay community outrightly condemned it and reacted negatively to all the self-pity.
In 1970 ‘The Boys’ was made into a movie with the same cast as the play. This time for the most part the reviews were positive ….(it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) Pauline Kael, the leading critic of the day was alone in finding absolutely nothing redeeming about it, and even though the Los Angeles Times praised it as “unquestionably a milestone” they steadfastedly refused to run its ads. The LGBT community was however still split on this very definite take on how gay men were being perceived and portrayed. One wrote at the time “I was horrified by the depiction of the life that might befall me. I have very strong feelings about that play. It’s done a lot of harm to gay people.”
In 2013 filmmaker Crayton Robey made a documentary called Making the Boys all about how the play ever came to be mounted and then filmed, and the impact that it had on the community as a whole. For the actors who had ignored the advice of agents and friends to take part, there was success and acclaim, but nevertheless most of their careers suffered as a result, and Mart Crowley the author never had another success after this and took to drinking all the profits he had made. In those early days ‘The Boys’ shouldered the burden of being the only visible gay thing for the ‘outside world’ to see and clearly earned it’s place in the annals of our history for that alone, but the jury still seems to be out on whether in itself should be loved or loathed.
Crowley himself responded to the criticism of all the negative images that he created and said in the documentary The Celluloid Closet ” The self-depreciating humor was born out of low self-esteem. Back then homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness.”
This new production stars Mark Gatiss and his husband Ian Hallard, alongside James Holmes, Ben Mansfield, Daniel Boys, Greg Lockett, John Hopkins and Nathan Nolan and is directed by Adam Penfold. The reviews are not out yet, so we still don’t know how a contemporary audience will take to this very dated and controversial pre-AIDS pre-Stonewall play. The one opinion that everyone is curious to hear, is that of 81 year old Mart Crowley who is taking a trip to London to see if his play has fared any better than him.
The Boys In The Band plays 28th Sept – 30th October Park Theatre London then tours in Manchester, Brighton & Leeds. Tickets and further information from http://www.boysbandplay.com/
