The Boys in the Band (play)

The Boys in the Band (play)

The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 1968, and was revived on Broadway for its 50th anniversary in 2018. It was adapted into a feature film in 1970, likewise one of the first focusing on the lives of gay men. Crowley met Natalie Wood on the set of her film Splendor in the Grass while working as a production assistant.

About The Boys in the Band (play) in brief

Summary The Boys in the Band (play)The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley. The play premiered Off-Broadway in 1968, and was revived on Broadway for its 50th anniversary in 2018. It was adapted into a feature film in 1970, likewise one of the first focusing on the lives of gay men. It is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and the backgrounds of characters are revealed in the course of a birthday party. Crowley met Natalie Wood on the set of her film Splendor in the Grass while working as a production assistant. Wood hired him as her assistant, primarily to give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play. Crowley worked as an assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years. After several Hollywood film productions he was helping on were canceled, his wealthy friend Diana Lynn hired him to housesit. He lived in the Hollywood Georgian Mansion where he only had to ‘throw dinner parties and drink myself into oblivion’ He began writing instead of drinking, and began working on The Boys In The Band.

Crowley made no secret that all characters were based on real people in his life, with Michael reminding him of himself, describing the character as ‘a complex person who is aware of what is politically correct but has a sort of contempt for it’ The 2020 film adaptation of the play will be re-adapted as a 2020 feature film, with the 50th Anniversary Broadway cast, all of whom are out gay actors. Crowley has also stated, ‘I was not an activist, then or now. I just wrote the truth. I didn’t know what hit me. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in the next few years’ The play was dedicated to dancer Howard Jeffrey Jeffrey, who died in 1988 of AIDS, to whom the play was also dedicated. In The Boys in The Band: Something Personal, a short documentary accompanying Netflix’s release of the 2020 film Adaptation, Crowley clarified that Donald was based on was Douglas Murray, a friend he would periodically take wry comments from.