The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley (review)

The Boys in the Band opened off-Broadway in 1968 and had a powerful impact on American theatre and culture. The revival on Broadway fifty years later raised the question: How much of an impact remains? With its Oscar Wilde–like wit and sharply defined characterizations, Crowley’s play offered a glimpse of an era when being gay and lesbian meant fear of “outing” in the public sphere. Although the emotional impact has dulled, the revival, guided by Joe Mantello’s swift-paced direction, maintained its core purpose: the engaging, humorous, and empathetic depiction of a slice of homosexual life during a period in America that demonized homosexuality.

Up to and through the 1960s, closeting was necessary for survival, and friendship among gays and lesbians meant more than a Facebook link. The play’s plot, a birthday party, was more than a celebration: like the bars or Fire Island, it defined a physical space to vent, commiserate, share, bond, and openly express without fear of reprisal. Amid oppression, love and support among gay men existed privately. Through rifts and self-effacing humor, the characters in the play need one another. One of the characters, Emory, flaunts unabashedly; the others develop a veneer of hetero-masculinity for self-preservation, and only at the party are they able to drop the façade. The frustration, rage, and repressed emotional toll expressed in the play boils over in Stonewall’s open rebellion the following year.

The play’s neoclassic structure holds up well: one continuous time; one place (Michael’s apartment, designed beautifully by David Zinn, which depicted a two-level, crimson-colored backdrop, with a sunken pit center-stage and a second level framed by see-through glass); and one action, Harold’s birthday party. The recent revival, trimmed and condensed into one intermission-less act (as opposed to the original two acts), centered on Michael (Jim Parsons), an alcoholic on the mend, who, through the course of the play, falls off the wagon and turns his self-loathing aggression onto his party invitees. Among the guests are a well-crafted cross-section of characters: Michael’s lover, the bookish Donald (Matt Bomer), who attempts to mollify Michael’s self-destruction; the math teacher Hank (Tuc Watkins) and his promiscuous roommate Larry (Andrew Rannells), lovers working out their relationship; another couple, the effeminate Emory (Robin de Jesús) and an African American, Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington); Harold’s birthday present from Emory, the prostitute Cowboy (Charles Carver); and the birthday honoree, Harold (Zachary Quinto), “a thirty-two-year-old, ugly, pockmarked, Jew, fairy.” Into the party arrives, unexpectedly, Alan (Brian Hutchinson), Michael’s allegedly “straight” Georgetown University friend, whose marriage is on the rocks.

The cast of The Boys in the Band. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

The play’s conflict occurs when Alan is serendipitously tossed into the center of the party. Michael, caught between his past and present, unleashes his pent-up vitriol at the guests. Influenced by a popular book of the era, Eric Berne’s Games People Play, and Edward Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (a drama replete with “games”), Michael challenges the party to a game of “The Affairs of the Heart,” where players telephone the one person with whom each character once deeply and secretly loved. Despite efforts to thwart Michael’s vindictive parlor game, several guests make the call. When Alan’s turn arrives, Michael attempts to expose his latent homosexuality, overriding the protestations of Harold, who shares Michael’s animosity all too well. The existential tragedy for Michael and Harold is their self-loathing. But whereas Harold admits his self-depreciation and works through his self-effacement with marijuana and makeup, Michael seeks redemption in Christianity and therapy—both of which prove inadequate. The suspense surrounding Alan’s phone call—we think he is calling a male friend from college, Justin, but it turns out to be his wife, Fran—provides the...