The Boys in the Band (play)
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The Boys in the Band is a 1968 play by Mart Crowley about gay men living in New York City. It is considered to be a daringly groundbreaking work in American theater.
It opened on April 14, 1968 at New York City's Theater Four, where it ran for 1002 performances, an extremely healthy run for both an off-Broadway production and one not geared to a mainstream audience. In 1970, it was adapted into a successful motion picture directed by William Friedkin. The play had a successful revival at the WPA Theater in NYC in 1996. In 2002, a sequel to the play, called The Men from the Boys, premiered in San Francisco.
At a time when gay characters were seldom seen in theater performances and on TV, Crowley's play presented a well-rounded view of the homosexual milieu.
The play is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where nine of Harold's closest friends are throwing him a birthday party. One of his presents is "Cowboy", an attractive but obviously unintelligent male prostitute, since Harold, increasingly morose about losing his youthful looks, claims he no longer can attract cute young men. The other characters are Michael (the host, and a lapsed Roman Catholic alcoholic undergoing psychoanalysis); Donald (a conflicted friend who has moved from the city to spurn the homosexual lifestyle); Bernard (an African-American who still pines for the wealthy white boy in the house where his mother worked as a maid); Emory (who is extremely flamboyant and the most stereotypical of the group); Larry and Hank (a couple living together but disagreeing on the issue of monogamy); and Alan (Michael's allegedly straight college friend who drops in unexpectedly, anxious to tell Michael something but hesitant to do so when he sees the group). During the party the self-deprecating humor of the group takes a nasty turn as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a game where each man must call someone and tell him he loves him. Michael, believing that Alan has finally "outed" himself when he makes his call, is stunned to discover his friend's wife is on the line when he grabs the phone away from him. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael, but is left with the possibility that his decision to reveal his homosexuality was averted by his repulsion for the lifestyle he witnessed throughout the evening.
The Boys in the Band is bitter, bitchy, and scathing in the tradition of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the Bette Davis film All About Eve. According to Crowley's friend Gavin Lambert, actress Natalie Wood, who sympathized with Hollywood's gay scene, financially supported Crowley, himself a homosexual, so he would be free to write his play. Indeed, the author worked for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years. He first met her while working as a production assistant on the movie Splendor in the Grass. From that time on he became a longtime assistant to and friend of the couple. Wood also hired Crowley's boyfriend to work for them.
