‘The Boys In The Band’: The Iconic Play Finds New Meaning In Joe Mantello’s Starry-Eyed Film [Review]

The catty screeches of the smashed birthday partying queers in Mart Crowley’s Off-Broadway play “The Boys in the Band” were not merely sliver-sharp gibes and ice pic-like verbal jabs for their own sake. They were, rather, frayed confessions of self-loathing, a velvet rage that had curdled into shouts that were partially enough to mobilize gay and queer men to assert their identities in an unwelcome world. Though perhaps necessarily narrow, or specific, in its point of view, “The Boys in the Band” was a manifestation of a social tipping point, produced just before the Stonewall Uprising. Thus, the 1970 film adaptation, directed by William Friedkin, has always curiously saddled the queer cinematic history lines as both a milestone of gay cinema and yet something that some in the community may want to designate as a period piece, as if to distance themselves from a pre-liberation mindset, even so early in what is codified as some sort of gay rights movement. But, regardless of how successfully the loud rejoinder to the straight theatre (and film) world “The Boys in the Band” functions in its own time, indeed a piece that has its characters work through shade as a weapon against others and oneself, how is a re-adaptation supposed to succeed, or, rather, what’s it supposed to mean in 2020?

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