I'll admit it. When I first saw the film adaptation of The Boys in the Band, I loved it. I knew I wasn't supposed to, of course. I was in college at the time. My first boyfriend had instructed me that the politics of Mart Crowley's play (and subsequent screenplay) were all wrong. "Self-loathing" and "Internalized Homophobia" were the buzzwords at get-togethers of the Lesbian, Gay and Transgendered Student Association on campus.
So I did what any self-respecting newly-liberated young homo would do. I kept my feelings to myself.
What do I love about this play? Simple. It's well-written. The dialogue crackles and the characters are sharply delineated and three-dimensional. Frankly, in my book, that's worth a helluva lot more than political-correctness. Love! Valour! Compassion! may tell us everything we want to hear and show us everything we want to see about ourselves as faggots, but I don't buy a minute of it. Don't get me wrong. Terrence McNally knows how to write dialogue and to shape a scene and a play. But, frankly, I've never bought any of his characterizations. They feel fabricated, constructed. Whereas the flawed queens on parade in Mr. Crowley's world are immediately recognizable as real.
It saddens me that plays are evaluated more and more in this country not on the fundamentals of what makes for a satisfying evening of theatre (i.e. the craft of playwriting) but, instead, on their content. If a play is deemed to be saying something important, it doesn't matter to many more than a few rare critics that it's poorly written. Think of some of your favorite Shakespeare plays. What are they about, really? It's not what they're about that makes them enduring. It's the recognizable truth of the human beings that are brought to life in the play's details.
It's taken me 20 years to reach a state of liberation such that I can admit to liking this painfully hyper-critical examination of gay men on the cusp of their own liberation. Naturally, when I heard that Transport Group was reviving it, I ran to buy tickets.
Will I see you at the theatre?
