Last weekend, I watched Ryan Murphy’s Netflix production of The Boys in the Band, adapted from Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 off-Broadway play about a group of gay male friends at a birthday party who confront each other over drinks and struggle with the (pre-Stonewall) internalized hatred of living in a deeply homophobic society. It became the first commercially successful American play in which all the characters were gay men (though not all the actors in that first production were gay). Crowley, who died in March, got to see his play finally make it to Broadway in a 2018 Tony Award-winning 50th anniversary staging. Murphy brought the 2018 cast (this time comprised entirely of openly gay actors, including Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto as nemeses Michael and Harold) and director Joe Mantello back together for the Netflix film.
I was thinking about The Boys this week as well, when the announcement of Broadway’s Spotlight on Plays star-studded virtual readings series was made. You want throwbacks? Baby, they’ve got ‘em!
But are these really the plays that deserve a spotlight at this point in history? I get the appeal of seeing original Broadway casts (which is what Margulies’s Time Stands Still with Laura Linney, Eric Bogosian, Brian d’Arcy James, and Alicia Silverstone offers). It was definitely a selling point for Netflix’s Boys and the Disney+ streaming of Hamilton this past summer.
Collaboraction takes its annual Peacebook Festival online with We Still Dream, kicking off on October 17 and featuring two separate programs of original work by diverse local writers. This weekend, Congo Square unveils its all-new sketch comedy webseries, Hit ‘Em on the Blackside. The Neo-Futurists keep their aesthetic of over 30 years’ vintage going strong with their own election-season piece, 45 Plays for America’s First Ladies.
