418
MARTIN DUBERMAN
snickering so by the last act that
I
decided to leave - out of residual
respect for O'Neill and on the bare chance that
I
might be disturbing
some benighted neighbor actually absorbed in the damn thing.
MART CROWLEY, THE Boys IN THE BAND
Mart Crowley has been hailed as a bright new talent, and his
play about homosexuality as a breakthrough for freedom of expression
in the theater.
On
both counts, the estimate is inflated. Crowley is
essentially a gag writer, a man with a brilliant flair for one-liners.
("There's one thing to be said for masturbation: you certainly don't
have to look your best.") But he can't move a plot from
A
to B with–
out the construction creaking. Both the play's central situation, a
straight college chum .(who, of course, has gay tendencies but won't
face them) stumbling into a gay birthday party, and the play's central
gimmick, a telephone game of dialing the person one "truly loved in
one's life," are badly established and implausibly developed. And some
of the scenes, like the Negro boy's declaration of love for the son of
the white family his mother cooked for, are maudlin replications from
Screen Romance.
The playas "slice of gay life," moreover, represents a retrogressive
more than a forward step for the theater if, that is, one is interested in
delineating and understanding, as opposed to trivializing and marketing,
the "homosexual condition." For in fact
Boys in the Band,
despite
all its chic analytic references and its set acknowledgements that hysteria,
depression and self-hatred are the main components of gay life, none–
theless subtly glorifies that life. For the Boys, after all, are brave and
savagely self-aware; they do cope with the unlucky hand fate has dealt
them, and often do so with style and wit. They are, moreover, capable
of True Love, truer, it would seem, than those sad-sack old college
friends who live with women mostly to avoid the panic of recognizing
that they'd rather be living with men. Most of which is romantic
bullshit, and dangerous to boot - for it will help to confirm homosexuals
in the belief that theirs is merely a different not a lesser way (indeed,
the implication is that their sensitivity and self-awareness make theirs
the superior way), and to help them peddle that nonsense to the trillion
relativists who inhabit the outside world.
A
word is due the production:
Robert Moore has directed with almost extrasensory good taste and
the cast, with a few exceptions, could hardly be improved upon for the
authenticity of its performance.
TOM STOPPARD, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE
DEAD
Like Mart Crowley, Tom Stoppard is better at writing lines than
