Mart Crowley, Tony-winning playwright of ‘The Boys in the Band,’ dies at 84

Mart Crowley, a Tony Award-winning playwright whose comic tragedy “The Boys in the Band” helped bring openly gay characters onto the stage and screen, emerging as a landmark depiction of gay life more than a year before the Stonewall riots galvanized a national liberation movement, died March 7 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 84.

The cause was complications from heart surgery, said his goddaughter Natasha Gregson Wagner. Her mother, actress Natalie Wood, was one of Crowley’s closest friends, hiring him as an assistant and housing him from time to time in the home Wood shared with her husband, Robert Wagner.

For much of his career, Crowley was overshadowed by gay playwrights such as Larry Kramer, whose drama “The Normal Heart” wrestled with the AIDS crisis of the early 1980s, and Tony Kushner, whose two-part epic “Angels in America” won the Pulitzer Prize. But his 1968 examination of gay identity, repression and self-loathing was a milestone for artists and other theatergoers who recognized themselves as one of “The Boys in the Band,” even if some of the play’s acid-tongued dialogue would come to seem dated.

“We all stand firmly on the shoulders of that play,” said writer and producer Ryan Murphy, who brought “The Boys in the Band” to Broadway in 2018 and is producing an upcoming movie adaptation for Netflix.

As a gay youth in Indiana, Murphy added by phone, “I thought I was an alien” — a sentiment that vanished after seeing the 1970 movie adaptation, directed by William Friedkin and written and produced by Crowley. Since then, he said, “The play never left my subconsciousness.”

Crowley wrote “The Boys in the Band” at a time when homosexuality was criminalized across most of the country and gay characters were rarely seen in pop culture, often appearing only for comic effect or in marginal roles that ended in tragedy.

Nonetheless, three of the country’s leading playwrights — Edward Albee, William Inge and Tennessee Williams — were widely known to be gay, a fact that spurred a notorious New York Times essay by critic Stanley Kauffmann, who lamented “disguised homosexual influence” in the theater and called on dramatists to address gay themes head-on, without using straight characters as stand-ins.

His 1966 essay amounted to a kind of dare for Crowley, a gay 30-year-old screenwriter with a self-described “sugar-cane accent” from Mississippi. He was then broke, unemployed and frequently drunk, albeit building a happier life for himself in Hollywood than he had as a young man in the South, where he was molested by a family friend as a child but found refuge watching movies and plays.

In a 2009 episode of the public television show “Theater Talk,” Crowley recalled writing “The Boys in the Band” while staying at the home of a wealthy friend, actress Diana Lynn, the daughter-in-law of New York Post publisher Dorothy Schiff. Living for five weeks “in the lap of luxury — nannies butlers, maids and cooks” — he returned to his own home with the script of “The Boys in the Band,” which took its name from a throwaway line in the 1954 remake of “A Star Is Born.”

“There was a little of me in all the characters in that play,” Crowley once said. “I was determined to write a new kind of drama about homosexuality. All the plays I had ever seen on the subject were stereotyped, sensational, embarrassed or evasive. I tried to be thoughtful and honest and adult.”

Centered on a group of gay men gathered for a birthday party, “The Boys in the Band” premiered off-Broadway at Theater Four on Easter Sunday, 1968. The production “did for plays what ‘Oklahoma!’ did for musicals,” the playwright Neil Simon later told writer-producer Richard Kramer, adding that “he’d never seen such honesty on the stage before,” according to a 1993 New York Times report.

The original production never made it to Broadway but ran for more than two years and 1,001 performances, with a cast that included Cliff Gorman in an Obie-winning turn as Emory, who drops an f-bomb to deliver one of the play’s iconic lines about trading sex for a drink.

New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called “The Boys in the Band” “the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on the stage,” declaring that it was so vitriolic it made Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” “seem like a vicarage tea party.” Crowley’s script, he added, “remorselessly peels away the pretensions of its characters and reveals a pessimism so uncrompomising in its honesty that it becomes in itself an affirmation of life.”

That pessimism was bracingly evident in one of the play and movie’s most shocking lines — “You show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse” — and defended by Crowley, who said that offering a stream of purely “positive images” was the role of political activists, not artists.

In the aftermath of Stonewall, some critics mellowed on “The Boys in the Band,” with LGBTQ scholar Michael Bronski writing that Crowley “made sure that heterosexual critics and audiences saw what they really believed: gay men who were unhappy and willfully cruel to one another.” Nonetheless, he added, the play “created possibilities for presenting gay material on the stage,” paving the way for gay characters in Broadway shows such as “Find Your Way Home” and “Butley.”

Crowley went on to write several more plays but primarily supported himself with television work, including on the ABC detective series “Hart to Hart.” And while “The Boys in the Band” was produced in translation around the world, it remained far from Broadway until 2018, when a star-studded revival featured actors including Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto and Robin De Jesús, who was nominated for a Tony as Emory.

The production received a Tony Award for best revival of a play, which served as vindication of sorts for Crowley. He had spent years feeling misunderstood by members of the gay community, said Murphy, who recalled an emotional exchange with the playwright after the award ceremony.

“You gave me something I’ve never had before,” Crowley told Murphy, “which is peace.”

Edward Martino Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Miss., on Aug. 21, 1935. “My father was a drunkard and my mother was a hypochondriac, dependent upon drugs,” he once said.

Crowley studied drama at the Catholic University in Washington, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1957, but was home in Mississippi for the filming of director Elia Kazan’s movie “Baby Doll.”

After introducing himself to the filmmaker, he talked his way into a job as a production assistant, later working on “The Fugitive Kind” (1960), directed by Sidney Lumet, and “Splendor in the Grass” (1961), a Kazan film starring Wood.

Crowley “was hired to pick my mom up at home and drive her to work every day,” Gregson Wagner said by phone. “When ‘Splendor’ wrapped he didn’t have a job, so she hired him as her assistant.”

He later developed a close friendship with Wood’s husband Wagner (they divorced and later remarried), who starred in “Hart to Hart” and helped recruit Crowley to the show as a producer and executive script consultant.

Crowley’s other plays included “Remote Asylum” (1970); “A Breeze From the Gulf” (1973), a semiautobiographical work that ran off-Broadway; “For Reasons That Remain Unclear” (1993), about a sexually abusive Catholic priest; and “The Men From the Boys,” a sequel to “The Boys” that premiered in San Francisco in 2002.