'The Boys In The Band': Raging Gracefully

Inspired, at least in part, by critic Stanley Kauffman's challenge to gay playwrights to ditch all the hinting and coding and veiled metaphor so as to honestly and openly depict the lives of homosexuals in their work, Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band debuted off-Broadway in 1968.

The structure was simple and not, to any regular theatergoer, unfamiliar: Over the course of an evening, characters gather, get drunk and turn on one another. Things get said that cannot be unsaid. Secrets are revealed. Curtain, house lights up.

The difference, of course, was that 1.It was a group of gay men doing all that gathering and drinking and lashing out, and 2. The lives of gay men in 1968 being what they were, most of the lashing taking place on stage turned out to be self-flagellation. These characters were caustically funny, yes, but they were also wracked with guilt and shame and self-hatred.

The play was a hit, and was made into a stagey