‘The Boys in the Band’ heads to Madison
GAY HISTORY TAKES THE SPOTLIGHT IN MADISON
Mart Crowley’s landmark 1968 play “The Boys in the Band” may seem dated or irrelevant to some today. But Marc Deaton and John Johmann beg to differ. That’s precisely why the pair selected this historic play for their theater, Madison Lyric Stage, in association with the New Haven Pride Center.
“It’s been enough time now,” said Deaton, who directs “The Boys in the Band,” which opens Thursday under a large tent on the grounds of Madison’s Deacon John Grave House. “It’s a very important time to see this play because it has a lot of relevance with the gay community today, even though it’s over 50 years old.”
When “The Boys in the Band” opened Off-Broadway in April 1968, it caused a sensation as it was the first play to portray a cast of entirely gay, male characters earnestly and honestly. With a mostly (then) unknown cast including Leonard Fry, Kenneth Nelson and Laurence Luckinbill, the production enjoyed a run of 1,001 performance. The show was revived Off-Broadway briefly in 1996 and finally arrived on Broadway three summers ago featuring Zachary Quinto and Norwalk native Robin De Jesús under Joe Mantello’s direction.
“The Boys in the Band,” which runs in Madison July 22 through Aug. 1, was filmed in 1970 with the original, Off-Broadway cast, and again last year with Montello’s Broadway cast.
The fact that the play is something of a period piece doesn’t make “The Boys in the Band” any less stage-worthy, according to Johmann, who serves as executive
director of Madison Lyric Stage and plays Michael in the show, a sharp-tongued alcoholic.
“I think that it’s important that we look at it as a period piece and try to learn from the gentlemen who are portrayed in the piece and what they were going
through in 1968,” he said. “It’s before Stonewall, it’s before the Gay Liberation Movement."
“I think that the play has sort of a checkered past,” Johmann said. “The people in the time of that story don’t want to look back on themselves in that way. But it’s
important that we do because I feel we need to understand who these people were. What they were up against. What they fought against. There needs to be an understanding that we can’t go back there.”
“If you talk with younger gay men, there’s not a relevance because it wasn’t within their lifetime," Deaton said. "That’s why we have history. We learn a lot by examining history."
Patrick Dunn, executive director of the New Haven Pride Center, called the piece “a case study in where people’s heads were at” back then.
“There is this reality of how things were during this time period that is, I think for a lot of young people, almost not comprehensible,” Dunn said, adding that the younger generation has little concept of what it meant to be gay back then because documented history is relatively scant.
“At this point, the knowledge isn’t being handed down the way it always had been, which was in bar spaces where the older generation would meet the younger generation and tell these stories,” Dunn said. “AIDS wiped out an entire generation of storytellers.”
Though Dunn called the play a period piece, he pointed out that in many ways “The Boys in the Band” is insightfully relevant today.
“This whole subplot with racism within the LGBTQ community is still a conversation we’re not able to have in 2021," he said. "And the fact that they were having it in this show goes to tell you how it was almost ahead of its time. And sure, are there things that a young, super-radical queer person might be like, ‘Oh God, I’m offended by how I’m being portrayed!’ It’s the reality of how our community lived. Particularly when our community had no legal protection.”
“If we’re not telling their stories, then nobody’s learning them,” he said.
For more information about the show, visit madisonlyricstage.org.