There are plenty of dramas that look different with time, but it’s the peculiar fate of “The Boys in the Band,” Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play, to have been so buffeted by changing times that the play keeps changing its identity.
At this point, in fact, I’d say that there are five stages of “The Boys in the Band.”First, it was a revolutionary work of commercial theater that took you into the lives of half a dozen gay New Yorkers — which doesn’t sound like a big deal, but back then even the most celebrated American playwrights, a number of whom were gay, felt constrained in their portrayal of gay characters.
Volumes have been written about how the heterosexual relationships in their works were often “coded” gay relationships.
Mart Crowley broke with all that.
Inspired, in part, by a New York Times diatribe from the critic Stanley Kauffman,
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