Saturday, April 1st, 2023

The Boys in the Band (abstract)

The Boys in the Band

by Mart Crowley

Published by Secker & Warburg

Published 1968 (English ed. 1969)
Drama: plays
182 pgs. • Find on Amazon.com


Abstract

From the dust jacket of the first English edition:

The opening in New York last April of Boys in the Band was greeted by rave reviews and long lines at the box office. It immediately established Mart Crowley as one of the most exciting young playwrights to appear in some time.

Clive Barnes wrote in The New York Times:

The play is by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on the stage. We are a long way from Tea and Sympathy here. The point is that this is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu, and the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis for human experience…

The power of the play is the way in which it remorselessly peels away the pretensions of its characters and reveals a pessimism so uncompromising in honesty that it becomes in itself an affirmation of life.


Back of dust cover inside:

Mart Crowley was born in 1935 in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Boys in the Band is his first play.


Jacket design by Diane and Leo Dillon

First English edition of Boys in the Band, signed by members of the cast in London, England, May 24, 1969. Image courtesy of C. Todd White and the HIC Archives.

 ©2017 by The Tangent Group.


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