Acting Gay in the Age of Queer: Pondering the Revival of The Boys in the Band

Acting Gay in the Age of Queer: Pondering the Revival of The Boys in the Band TIMOTHY SCHEIE "Bellwether," "watershed," "crossroads," "turning point": with these and other ponderous tenns, critics have hailed Mart Crowley's 1968 The Boys in the Band as the breakthrough production that brought frank and direct representations of homosexuality to American theatre. Where earlier plays had disposed of their "deviant" characters in a denouement that was often tantamount to a cleansing of the homosexual taint, spectators of The Boys in the Band witnessed for the first time a group of men discussing their sex lives, dancing together, kissing, and even having sex on a mainstream stage.' The play takes the spectator to an exclusively gay birthday party at the apartment of Michael, a troubled man who coerces his guests into playing a truth game that elicits a series of witty barbs, confessions, and emotional outbursts as each tells the story of his life and loves. In a marked reversal of theatre tradition, the sole straight character, Michael's fonner college roommate Alan, is the outsider; it is his unexpected arrival that triggers an explosive scene in Crowley's play, and the restoration of order requires the purging of the straight man from the stage.' The Boys in the Band was a hit (1002 perfonnances). Thereafter, gay characters have frequently occupied center stage instead of the more pathologized regions of the margins, and "gay plays" have flourished in the years since The Boys' success. Despite the play's groundbreaking status, the unflattering portrait of gay identity The Boys in the Band puts forth - a group of unhappy, self-destructive men who attend a boozy party that ends in an emotional bloodbath - did not leave all spectators with a feeling of exhilarating freedom. Infamous lines such as "You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse'" fueled growing suspicions that the play, far from empowering, suggests instead the impossibility of a viable gay identity. One spectator writes, "I felt like I had been discovered .... I wanted to fall into the earth. I was horrified by the depiction of the life that might befall me. I have very strong feelings about Modern Drama, 42 (1999) I 2 TIMOTHY SCHEIE that play. It's done a lot of hann to gay people.'" The Boys in the Band starkly illustrates the dangers of entering representation, and the unease it has generated overthe years refules the commonsensical notion that increased visibility constitutes an unequivocal gesture of empowennent for a historically invisible and oppressed minority.' Consequently, when a new production of The Boys in the Band opened in New York City in the summer of 1996, nearly thirty years after the first run had ended, one might have anticipated that its tarnished reputation would have quelled the enthusiasm of potential spectators.6 This was not the case. Although it raised a few eyebrows, audiences generally received the revival well; after a successful run at the WPA theatre, it moved to the larger Lucille Lortel theatre for several more weeks. I saw the revival at both theatres and on each occasion witnessed what appeared to be a predominantly gay audience thoroughly relishing the show. I too enjoyed it, yet was not entirely comfort- . able with my reaction, nor with that of the audiences. After all, aren't we supposed to have a problem with The Boys in the Band? I wondered at the audience's - and my own - willingness not only to tolerate but to derive pleasure from watching the taxonomy of pathetic and self-loathing characters that inhabit this play. After decades of discomfort or even disavowal, what had changed 10 make this play acceptable, meaningful, or at the very least entertaining for a gay spectator in 19967 This begs the question of what it means to be a "gay" spectator in the 1990S in the first place. The idea of "gay" as a self-evident category of identity and an easily definable community has lost considerable currency in the age of the queer. In contrast with the struggle to make visible and to affinn proudly a viable gay and lesbian identity that characterized many theatre productions of...