Archive for May, 2012

The Boys in the Band—Mart Crowley’s
trenchant comedy about the gay community, circa 1968—is revived at
Murfreesboro’s Out Front on Main Inc. as part of the celebration of Pride Month
in the university town, running June 7-17 at the theater, located at 1511 E.
Main Street.
D. Richard
Browder directs—and does double-duty, playing Bernard—the play which is
presented Thursday through Sunday evenings, with a 7:30 p.m. curtain nightly.
Tickets are $10 general admission and $5 for students and seniors.
Crowley’s first play, The Boys in the Band, is considered
a groundbreaking work in American theater, “the first truly honest portrayal of
the lives of contemporary homosexuals.” It opened in New York on April 14, 1968,
at the off-Broadway Theater Four and ran for 1,002 performances before being
adapted to film.
At a time when gay characters were seldom seen in commercial media except as
crude stereotypes, this play presented a well-rounded view of what critics of
the day referred to as ‘‘the homosexual milieu.’’ Taking place in an apartment
in New York’s posh Upper East Side, the action concerns nine acquaintances who
gather for the birthday of one of their friends.
The group includes Michael (Thomas Prunier), a lapsed Roman Catholic
alcoholic who is undergoing psychoanalysis; Donald (Blair Thompson), a
conflicted friend who has moved far from the city to spurn the homosexual
lifestyle; Harold (Peter Depp), who is turning thirty and is morose about losing
his youthful looks; Bernard (BroadwayWorld Tennessee best featured actor D. Richard Browder), an
African American who still pines for the wealthy white boy of the house where
his mother was a maid; Emory (BroadwayWorld Tennessee best actor George W. Manus
Jr.), who revels in his homosexuality in his effeminate flamboyance; and Larry
and Hank (Asa Ambrister and Ryan Vogel), a couple that live together despite the
fact that they do not agree on the issue of monogamy.
Joining them are a male prostitute (Zach Parker) who has been hired as a
‘‘present’’ for Harold’s birthday and Alan (Patrick Goedicke), an old college
friend of Michael’s, who claims to be straight but who becomes a little too
emotional when his manhood is threatened and who is strangely reluctant to leave
each time he says he is going. Modern audiences may find these character types
overly familiar, in part due to the success of The Boys in the Band,
which has bred countless imitations.
The Men From The Boys—Crowley’s 2003 sequel to The Boys in the
Band—which follows the story of the characters some 30 years after the
first play, will be presented as a staged reading by The First Night
Honors in Nashville on August 26.
For further information and for reservations, call (615) 869-8617 or go to www.outfrontonmain.com.

Read
more: http://nashville.broadwayworld.com/article/Out-Front-On-Main-Celebrates-Pride-Month-With-THE-BOYS-IN-THE-BAND-67-17-20120529#ixzz1wSIYlLmH

Let us take you back in time for a minute.  A time before Peter Depp could be open about who he is on TV, a time before Adam Lambert, before Will & Grace, before the AIDS crisis, before HIV has even been heard of, before pride festivals, before marches, before the Stonewall Riots.  Back when Homosexuality is against the law.  Homosexuality is listed as a psychological disorder.   Homosexuals are people no one knows.  We barely know each other in the United States.  To reveal ourselves puts too much at risk.  However, thanks to WWII the gays have found each other in the military.  Then when they came home they settled in communities of their own in the port towns.  Michaels Apartment is in one of these communities, Greenwich Village in New York City.  So welcome to the summer of 1968.  The United States is changing, free love, civil rights movements for the African-Americans, and overall civil unrest.  But the world is still against the gay man, even in New York City.  No man may dance within 3 feet of another man.  No homosexual may be served liquor by state law.  So there are no gay bars.  People found in a homosexual “establishment” or engaged in a homosexual acts are arrested on morals charges.  This arrest has your name run in the newspaper, causing disgrace, loss of employment, friends, housing, respect and more.  But we are gathering in numbers.  We are finding things in common, be it divas, theater, film, alcohol, drugs, or just the company of men.  The Boys in the Band brings the world a picture of what it is to be gay in 1968.  And the world finally listens and sees who and what gay men are, what gay men can be.  We are more than a punch line or a plot device.  We are real people with emotional range, people to relate to, people that are just, Boys in the Band.