A gossipy, sightful survey of the (often closeted) gay ntributn to Amerin theatre
Contents:
- A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS
- GAYS ON BROADWAY BY ETHAN MORDN REVIEW – STAGE WHISPERS
- THE 10 BT GAY MILS OF ALL TIME
- ROBERT PATRICK, EARLY AND PROLIFIC PLAYWRIGHT OF GAY LIFE, DI AT 85
A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAY THEATER, THREE ACTS
In the first half of the 20th century, you uld be arrted for stagg a gay play. Theatr uld be packed and shows sold out, but that wouldn’t stop them om beg shut down for "obscene" ntent. * gay playwrights *
Inspired by Howards End (1910), wrten by EM Forster — who appears the play as the closeted gu-que character Man — Lopez draws heavily upon his own experience of gay life New York Cy. Sherman’s Pulzer Prize nomated play Bent, produced first 1978 at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, is wily regard as the play that sparked more rearch to the treatment of homosexuals Nazi Germany durg World War II.
GAYS ON BROADWAY BY ETHAN MORDN REVIEW – STAGE WHISPERS
* gay playwrights *
In 1993, he received the Pulzer Prize for his play Angels Ameri: A Gay Fantasia on Natnal Them which was later ma to a film starrg Meryl Streep, Al Paco, Patrick Wilson, Mary-Louise Parker, and Emma Thompson. Popular works: Angels Ameri: A Gay Fantasia on Natnal Them, A Bright Room Called Day, The Good Person of Szechuan. His plays have been veloped and seen at the Ojai Playwrights Conference, the Obie Award-wng The Fire This Time Ftival, The 24-Hour Plays: Natnals, the Obie Award-wng Harlem 9’s 48 Hours… Harlem at The Natnal Black Theatre, HomeBase Theatre Collective, The Movement Theater Company, The New School’s 2015 AoFuturism Conference, and The Tenth Magaze, llaboratn wh the Llie-Lohman Mm of Gay and Lbian Art.
THE 10 BT GAY MILS OF ALL TIME
Gay-themed Broadway mils have e a long way the past fifty years. The on are the bt. * gay playwrights *
In wrg , Crowley had liberately taken up the challenge tossed down by the theater cric Stanley Kffmann, who a 1966 New York Tim say headled “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguis” asked why that era’s most famo gay playwrights — meang Edward Albee, Tennsee Williams and William Inge — didn’t wre about themselv and leave straights alone. Nor do homosexuals suffer om an “emotnal-psychologil illns, ” as he sually mentns — for this was an era which such public slurs were chic and permissible, pecially the guise of lerary cricism. ”) Still, there was no nyg that ank plays about gay male life had never reached the mastream, never perated the circl which Kffmanns and Roths and social Crowley wrote the bt and funnit and gayt play he uld, about ne gay men (or maybe eight and a half) at a birthday party.
Though some of the men fse the ambient homophobia of the time better than others, almost all of them suffer om the self-hatred that seemed then, and maybe now, to filtrate even the bt-fend personaly. (The dialogue crackl wh the sual racism and misogyny of the time, much as Kffmann’s prose glters wh homophobia.
It is also an acknowledgment of a larger urgency about the reprentatn of gay men popular entertament: a moment that, the theater at least, is both sprgboard and logy. At a time when many of the classic gay plays are returng to the Broadway stage — “Boys the Band, ” “Angels Ameri” and “Torch Song Trilogy” among them — almost no new on are on the horizon to jo them. When Luckbill, then 33, agreed to play Hank — the “straightt” of the gay men, who’d left his wife and children — his agent said he might as well bid goodbye to his reer.
ROBERT PATRICK, EARLY AND PROLIFIC PLAYWRIGHT OF GAY LIFE, DI AT 85
But so heavy and lgerg was the perfume of gayns g off the project that even a heterosexual actor like Luckbill was thought to be mtg theatril suici to book . William Friedk’s fahful movie versn, released 1970 and starrg the entire stage st, turned to a touchstone of gay style and sufferg for gays and straights well beyond New York. I wre that admirg many of s spirual forebears, om Tennsee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” 1945 to Robert Anrson’s “Tea and Sympathy” 1953 to the early works of Doric Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Robert Patrick and many others who helped spark an efflorcence of downtown gay drama centered at Caffe Co, wh s makhift k-crate stage, startg while buildg on those — and, Crowley says, on Arthur Lrents’s screenplay for Aled Hchck’s 1948 film, “Rope, ” which two gay men murr a classmate for sport — “The Boys the Band” has had the more nsequential gay trajectory.