‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ with Heidi Schreck is coming to Amazon Prime Agitated and embarrassed, Michael unleashes his rancor on his guests in a manner that could give Martha a run for her money in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” - a palpable influence on Crowley’s drama. Michael has fallen off the wagon after a surprise visit from his supposedly straight college friend, Alan (played with sorrowful gruffness by Brian Hutchison). Lighting up a joint as he settles into the festive turbulence, Harold presides as a choral counterweight, parrying Michael’s caustic thrusts with his own savage truths. Zachary Quinto plays Harold, the birthday boy, who forthrightly describes himself as a “32-year-old, ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy,” making clear that no one, not even sharp-tongued Michael, is going to be able to wound him with a cutting remark. Jim Parsons stars as Michael, the host of the all-male soiree who tries to conceal his self-hatred under Hermès cashmere that still isn’t paid off. With a screenplay by Crowley and Ned Martel, this handsome remake is directed by Mantello at an entertaining clip. Crowley’s work maps out the internalization of this toxic brew of intolerance, the way it seeps into the fabric of gay identity and corrodes from within. The conditions have improved for LGBTQ people in the last half-century, but discrimination and homophobia persist.
Vito Russo went so far as to declare in “The Celluloid Closet,” his irreplaceable 1981 book on homosexuality in the movies, that “The Boys in the Band” made the “best and most potent argument for gay liberation ever offered in a popular art form.”Īs I said to my gay BFF after watching the new Netflix version of “The Boys in the Band,” which reunites the cast of Joe Mantello’s Tony-winning 2018 Broadway revival, Crowley’s landmark work is both dated and eternal, a period piece that still has something urgent to say. Between the indulgence of flamboyant stereotypes and the internalized homophobia of Michael, the alcoholic protagonist and psychological arsonist, the drama only seemed to compound unflattering caricatures.īut Crowley was actually condemning society for making love between men the dirtiest secret of all. As groundbreaking as Crowley’s play was in bringing visibility to a subculture that was ridiculed when not being ignored, the work was already being dismissed as retrograde by the time the film version came out in 1970.Ĭrowley’s campy wisecracks resounded in gay bars across America for years, but an ambivalence prevailed.
The psychodrama is relentless, but no one commits suicide, the traditional end for homosexuals in plays and movies, so it was considered progress.Ī year after “The Boys in the Band” debuted onstage, the Stonewall riots would usher in the gay liberation movement. The characters in this 1968 drama, New York friends gathered for a birthday celebration, slurp cocktails, trade bitchy repartee, assemble into a chorus line, flirt, flame out and throw fits. When Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” the granddaddy of gay plays, first appeared off-Broadway, it offered an inside peek into what had been consigned to the shadows: gay male life as it is experienced outside the closet.