Drama:
The Boys in the Band, pr., pb. 1968
Remote Asylum, pr. 1970
A Breeze from the Gulf, pr. 1973
Avec Schmaltz, pr. 1984
For Reasons That Remain Unclear, pr. 1993
Three Plays, pb. 1996
Screenplay:
The Boys in the Band, 1970 (adaptation of his play)
Teleplays:
There Must Be a Pony, 1986 (adaptation of James Kirkwood’s novel)
Bluegrass, 1988
People Like Us, 1990
Martino Crowley, shortened to Mart Crowley, was the only child of devout, conservative, Catholic parents who sent him to a Roman Catholic high school in Vicksburg and urged him to attend the University of Notre Dame. Crowley balked and went to Los Angeles, drawn there by his early fascination with films and film stars. Soon his father, a transplanted Midwesterner of Irish ancestry, compromised and allowed Crowley to attend the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Two years of that atmosphere, however, was all that the starstruck Crowley could take, and he fled from Catholic University to the University of California at Los Angeles to study art, hoping to prepare himself to become a designer of film sets. He soon returned to Catholic University, where he developed a close association with classmate James Rado, one of the writers of the rock musical Hair (which ran in New York in 1968). Crowley worked in summer stock theater in Vermont during his summers at Catholic University.
Upon his graduation in 1957, Crowley’s interest in drama drew him to California to write scripts and work with production companies. From 1964 to 1966, he worked as private secretary for Natalie Wood, whom he had met when they worked together on William Inge’s film Splendor in the Grass (1961).
Discouraged when his film script of Dorothy Baker’s 1962 novel Cassandra at the Wedding was not produced, Crowley left California in 1966 and spent a year in Rome. By 1967, his fortunes were improving; Paramount Pictures filmed his screenplay Fade In. The studio’s failure to release the film, however, led Crowley to begin psychoanalysis to help him deal with his ensuing depression and anxiety. Through this psychoanalysis, he reached his decision to write an overtly homosexual play about gays celebrating the birthday of one of their friends.
The basic idea for The Boys in the Band had occurred to Crowley eight years earlier, and he had occasionally returned to it, but psychoanalysis provided him with the self-knowledge he needed to bring such a play to fruition. The actual writing proceeded quickly once Crowley decided to write the play; he completed the script in five weeks during the summer of 1967. Crowley’s agent, although enthusiastic about his writing, doubted that any producer would touch a play so overtly homosexual. The script, nevertheless, reached Robert Barr, who decided to produce it.
Casting the play presented problems because established actors would not risk stereotyping themselves by taking roles in a play about homosexuals. When the play opened at the Vandam Theater in January, 1968, therefore, it was cast with virtual unknowns. By April of the same year, The Boys in the Band had moved to an Off-Broadway theater where, save for a sprinkling of homophobic reviews, it was well received.
The action is set in the New York apartment of a gay man, Michael, host of a birthday party for a gay friend, Harold, who arrives late. Meanwhile, amid queenly banter and dancing, Michael’s former college roommate, Alan, who has left his wife, arrives and precipitates much of the play’s action, which includes a telephone game not unlike the “get-the-guest” ploy Edward Albee uses in his 1962 drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The importance of The Boys in the Band, which ran for more than a thousand performances on Broadway, is that it is the first play in American theater to deal head-on with an exclusively homosexual situation. Tennessee Williams had created homosexual characters, such as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and Inge included in his later plays some overtly gay characters, such as Vince in Natural Affection (1963) and Pinky in Where’s Daddy? (1966). These characters, however, were aberrations. In The Boys in the Band, it is Alan, the only straight character in the play, who is aberrant. The play reached a broad audience on Broadway and a still broader one when, in 1970, it was released as a film, for which Crowley wrote the screenplay. The play’s director, Robert Moore, won a Drama Desk Award, and Cliff Gorman, who played Emory, received an Obie Award for performance in an Off-Broadway theater. The play was also included in several anthologies of “best plays” of the 1960’s.
Later the same year, Crowley’s next play, Remote Asylum, was produced in Los Angeles at the Ahmanson Theatre and evoked no favorable comment. Set in Acapulco, it presents a hodgepodge of unlikely sycophants to a has-been female film star. The characters strike out at one another in ways that again recall the bickering of Albee’s characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the play does not have Albee’s strong central premise to justify its sustained shouting, contention, and bitchiness. Remote Asylum did not reach Broadway.
With A Breeze from the Gulf in 1973, Crowley was moving in more productive directions. This highly autobiographical play about an only child between ages seventeen and twenty-five and his parents–the smothering mother addicted to drugs, the indulgent father to alcohol–offers moments of tremendous psychological insight, although much of the time it talks and psychoanalyzes itself to death. The play suggests a considerable talent not totally in control of its medium. Nevertheless, with The Boys in the Band, Crowley had cut through the thicket that blocked the way to frank dramatic presentations of the homosexual lifestyle, and for this pioneering effort he is best remembered.