The Boys in the Band (play)

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, Michael's married college friend[4], is an unexpected party guest. 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 "frenemy",[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 is a fashion photographer who prefers multiple sex partners.
• Hank is 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.

The Boys in the Band was written by American playwright Mart Crowley. In 1957 Crowley had started working for a number of television production companies, before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film Splendor in the Grass[5] while working as a production assistant.[6] Wood hired him as her assistant,[6] primarily to give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play The Boys in the Band.[7][8] Wood, Crowley's close friend, inspired him to move from New York to Hollywood.[6] According to Crowley's friend Gavin Lambert, Wood sympathized with Hollywood's gay scene, and financially supported Crowley[6][9] so he would be free to write his play.[10] Crowley worked as an assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years.[6]

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.[6]

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.'"[11]

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."[12] Crowley has also stated, "I was not an activist, then or now. I didn't know what hit me. I just wrote the truth."[6]

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"[13] and inspired by Crowley's friend.[6] 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."[14]

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

Ryan Murphy will adapt the play for Netflix with the 2018 Broadway revival cast.[27]

When The Boys in the Band premiered in 1968, mainstream audiences were shocked.[28] The play was profiled in the William Goldman book The Season: 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.[29]

After gays saw The Boys in the Band, they no longer would settle for thinking of themselves as pathetic and wouldn't be perceived as such any longer. Now that [characters] had brought their feelings out of the closet, this new generation would dare to be different. And, just as some whites' view of blacks changed after seeing A Raisin in the Sun, so too did the outlook of many straights after they caught The Boys in the Band. Some whom I personally know felt terrible and–I saw this happen!–actually changed the way they treated gays.

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".[4]

In 2010, Elyse Summer in her review for CurtainUp called it a "smart gimmick" full of dated "self-homophobic, low self-esteem characters".[3] In the same year, Steve Weinstein from the Edge website called it "Shakespearean".[30]

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

• Lambert, Gavin (January 11, 2012). Natalie Wood: A Life (First ed.). New York: Knopf Doubleday. ISBN 978-0307816801.

• The Boys in the Band at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• The Boys in the Band at the Internet Broadway database