The Boys in the Band (play)

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For an article about the film adaptation, see The Boys in the Band.

The Boys in the Band
Poster for the 1996 off-Broadway revival
Written by	Mart Crowley
Date of Premiere	April 14, 1968
Country of Origin	USA
Original Language	English

The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

It is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where nine of Harold's closest friends are throwing him a birthday party. One of his presents is "Cowboy", an attractive but obviously unintelligent male prostitute, since Harold, increasingly morose about losing his youthful looks, claims he no longer can attract cute young men. The other characters are Michael, the host and a lapsed Roman Catholic alcoholic undergoing psychoanalysis; Donald, a conflicted friend who has moved from the city to spurn the homosexual lifestyle; Bernard, an African-American who still pines for the wealthy white boy in the house where his mother worked as a maid; Emory, who is extremely flamboyant and the most stereotypical of the group; Larry and Hank, a couple living together but disagreeing on the issue of monogamy; and Alan, Michael's allegedly straight college friend who drops in unexpectedly, anxious to tell Michael something but hesitant to do so when he sees the group. During the party the self-deprecating humor takes a nasty turn as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a game where each man must call someone and tell him he loves him. Michael, believing that Alan has finally "outed" himself when he makes his call, is stunned to discover his friend's wife is on the line when he grabs the phone away from him. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael, but is left with the possibility that his decision to reveal his homosexuality was averted by his repulsion for the behavior he witnessed throughout the evening.

Spoilers end here.

The Boys in the Band is bitter, bitchy, and scathing in the tradition of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the Bette Davis film All About Eve. According to Crowley's friend Gavin Lambert, actress Natalie Wood, who sympathized with Hollywood's gay scene, financially supported Crowley, himself a homosexual, so he would be free to write his play.^[1] The playwright, who first met her while working as a production assistant on the movie Splendor in the Grass, worked as an assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years.

The off-Broadway production, directed by Robert Moore, opened on April 14, 1968 at Theater Four,^[2] where it ran for 1000 performances, an extremely healthy run for both an off-Broadway production and one not geared to a mainstream audience. The cast included Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard.

In 1970, it was adapted into a successful motion picture directed by William Friedkin. The play had a brief revival at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in Greenwich Village in 1996.^[2] In 2002, a sequel entitled The Men from the Boys premiered in San Francisco,^[3] and was produced in Los Angeles the following year.^[4]