The New York Times: ONE EVENING NOT long after “The Boys in the Band” had its Off Broadway premiere in April 1968, Laurence Luckinbill, who played Hank, brought his tool kit to work. Theater Four, as the joint was called, was a dowdy old converted church in a part of Manhattan that the play’s author, Mart Crowley, called a “senseless-killing neighborhood.” But Luckinbill wasn’t lugging tools to make repairs. Instead, he drilled a hole in a piece of the set called a tormentor flat, about waist-high, so that he and his eight castmates, standing backstage, could get a glimpse of whoever was sitting sixth row center: the best seats in the house. Over the coming weeks the actors took turns peeping at the likes of Jackie Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Groucho Marx and Rudolf Nureyev. Even New York City’s glamorous mayor, John Lindsay, showed up.
2 comments:
I unfortunately have not seen much historical gay theatre . I've seen a lot of theatre depicting queer black life as it exists today but I do feel the need to expand my knowledge of the history and times of the gay community. This article offered a wonderful take on the history of gay theatre and it's legacy. I think that the comment made about gay culture and its legacy is so vital right now considering that the gay man community who should be teaching the LGBT community today about acceptance of each other died in the AIDS crisis. An entire generation of the gay community was wiped out which influenced the culture. A play like Boys in the Band is a play from that generation. Reviving it is like reviving them. They too deserve their stories to be told, their lives to be memorialized, and their knowledge to be passed down. It is quite a shame that they were never able to do that but we must still revive them.
We talked about this play in Queer Theatre last semester and the overall agreement was that it was not super awesome that this play was making a comeback. While it was ragingly successful in the sixties for being a gay play that caught onto the mainstream audience base, like the article says, it is full of dated speech and colloquialisms that attend to the racist and bigoted sixties lifestyle. What can be said for the play, that the article’s author goes into much depth about, is that it really does reflect on what it was like to be gay, and what it is like, with all the self-hatred and exposure surrounding the gay lifestyle. I don’t know that I could sit through this play without being obscenely uncomfortable with the scenario, but from what the article is saying, that’s kind of the point. Angels in America, however, does withstand the test of time by not only dealing with gayness in the era it’s based in, but by discussing real human relationships. And a crazy angel…
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