NEW YORK — Holy social anthropology! What is this strange and barbaric tribal ceremony that our unsuspecting traveler has stumbled upon? Men are actually dancing with — gasp — other men, in a wrist-flicking, hip-wriggling, keister-twitching chorus line.
Perhaps they’re enacting some unspeakable mating ritual, the kind an adventurous American couple of the mid-1960s might have seen (and recoiled from) while watching a lurid documentary like “Mondo Cane.”
But this is definitely not the sort of activity Joe Average expects to encounter in the apartment of his best friend from college.
That, more or less, is the point of view of a lone, presumably heterosexual man when he arrives as an uninvited guest at the all-gay party of hedonism and hatred that is Mart Crowley’s epochal 1968 drama “The Boys in the Band,” which opened Thursday night in a starry but disconnected revival at the Booth Theater. And theatergoers, too, may feel an awakening shock at this moment.
Because, really, all the insinuating antics onstage — laced with frisky innuendos and stinging zingers — feel pretty humdrum to latter-day viewers, not so different from an episode of “Will & Grace.” What’s so shocking is how shocked the recent arrival appears, and what a pall of cold shame his disapproving presence casts over what has been a moment of joy, perhaps the only one the play allows.
This sudden plummeting of emotional temperature jolted me into a painful, present-tense awareness of how truly ghettoized — and terrifying — life was for most American gay men when “Boys” opened off-Broadway. I was a 13-year-old North Carolina middle-school student then and secretly followed the coverage of what became a Cultural Event with an uneasy fascination.
Although I hadn’t read the play, all accounts of it suggested that no one in his right mind would want to grow up to be like the miserable and vicious misfits it depicted. In his original New York Times review, Clive Barnes spoke of “the special self-dramatization and the frightening self-pity — true I suppose of all minorities, but especially true of homosexuals.”
And I thought that was just how teenagers were! I got myself a (temporary) girlfriend, pronto.
So it is definitely a cause for celebration that the self-loathing title characters of “Boys” are now being portrayed — in the play’s Broadway debut — by successful and, in some cases, wildly popular, mainstream actors who are (to use a quaint phrase) openly gay. They include Jim Parsons (“The Big Bang Theory”), Zachary Quinto (the J.J. Abrams “Star Trek” films) and Matt Bomer (“White Collar”).
I wish I could report that this charismatic and capable team, directed by the busy Joe Mantello, transported me vividly and uncompromisingly into the dark ages of homosexual life in these United States, and that I shuddered and sobbed in sympathy. But even trimmed from two acts to an intermission-free 110 minutes, the show left me largely impatient and unmoved.
Part of this is a matter of the miscasting of the production’s biggest marquee names, the seriously talented Parsons and Quinto. More important, though, is that this real-time drama only rarely seems to be happening in real time, with real feelings.
The bitchy quips are all delivered and landed with deft comic timing, and the show is an entertaining primer in the now widely accepted art of throwing shade. But I had to strain to imagine the boys of “Boys” were a blood-bound clan, better known to one another than their natural-born families were. And without that illusion of chosen consanguinity, the expositional creakiness of Crowley’s script is laid unflatteringly bare.
The structure of “Boys” is not unlike that of an earlier scandalous sensation of a play, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (There’s an allusion to Albee — whom one character confuses with Tennessee Williams — in the original text for “Boys.”) As in “Woolf,” a party is being thrown, like a sharp-edged stone from a slingshot, and wicked games will be played.
The host in this case is Michael (Parsons), a writer and semi-lapsed Catholic living — on maxed-out credit cards — in a sumptuous red velvet duplex in Manhattan’s East 50s. (David Zinn did the set, along with the refreshingly unexaggerated period costumes.) Michael is a withering wit and a hostile drunk; he has been off the sauce for five weeks when the play begins and intends to stay that way.
Fat chance, with the birthday party that’s happening tonight. It’s for Michael’s best frenemy, the misanthropic Harold (Quinto), for whom a social event means getting stoned and camouflaged in makeup (he has a pockmarked face) well in advance. As for the rest of the guests, I can’t improve on Pauline Kael’s description of them, in her review of the 1970 film, as “a 40s-movie bomber-crew cast: a Catholic, a Jew, a Negro, a hustler. ...”
Ticking off these boxes are a solid Bomer as Donald, Michael’s former lover and a fellow analysand (the parent-blaming specter of Freud hovers); Andrew Rannells (of “The Book of Mormon” and “Falsettos”) as Larry, a commercial artist; and Tuc Watkins as Hank, who has left his wife for Larry. Michael Benjamin Washington is Bernard, whose status as an African-American is the butt of the show’s nastiest humor. Bernard swaps stereotyping digs with Robin de Jesús’ (excellent) Emory, the most flamboyantly effeminate of the lot.
Then there are the outsiders: the Cowboy (Charlie Carver) of the midnight variety, who has been purchased by Emory as a birthday present for Harold, and the unlucky Alan (Brian Hutchison), that old roommate of Michael, whose arrival lights the fuse on the time bomb.
Michael falls off the wagon — a moment signaled by an action-freezing, sepulchral spotlight, courtesy of lighting designer Hugh Vanstone — and initiates an especially cruel, soul-baring party game. Make way for regrets, recriminations and the basis for a lifelong hangover.
Of course what happens after Alan (who swears he didn’t know Michael was gay) shows up isn’t all that different from before. Most of the characters are, like the play itself, diagnosticians of their sexual identities, and there’s a lot of “this is how we are, and how we got that way” soliloquizing.
Some of the fattier sections of such discourse have been trimmed away. But so, more damagingly, have many of the old movie references that establish Michael as a loving practitioner of camp, as both a source of genuine pleasure and a defense system.
These deletions make Michael seem like more of a bitter scold than he is already. On its own terms, Parsons’ self-contained, slow-burn performance is impressive. But in mannerisms and voice, this guy is too tight, too cautious to be the extravagant, escapist playboy he is said to be.
As his arch-nemesis, Harold, a heavily made-up Quinto, registers as an inhuman visitor from another planet, an effect that sometimes happens when handsome actors play ugly.
His line readings sound as if they come straight from the crypt, making Harold’s pronouncements disproportionately oracular and ominous. (Harold to Michael: “We tread very softly with each other because we both play each other’s game too well.”)
The rest of the cast is just fine, and they’re never better than when the boys are happily at play, dancing and camping and exchanging choice put-downs. But because they’re so endlessly, openly analytical, there’s no subtext for the actors to play, which means the big “reveals” aren’t all that revealing.
There is one superlative performance, however, that provides the show with its most genuinely moving moments. That comes from de Jesús, whose unapologetically nelly Emory slowly displays an innate dignity beneath the flippancy and frivolity.
In the 2010 revival of “La Cage aux Folles,” de Jesús portrayed a similar archetype, which he took so far over the top you expected him to float away. In this role, he grounds the classically effeminate gay man in a bedrock of genuine pain, yes, but also resilience.
Some pundits who see “Boys” as a sort of positive prophecy have said that they could imagine Emory later joining the barricades during the Stonewall uprising of 1969. De Jesús justifies that prediction, and makes — who’d have thought it? — silly old Emory the best reason to hope for the futures of the time-warped boys of this disharmonious band.
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Production Notes:
“The Boys in the Band”
Through Aug. 11 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, boysintheband.com. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.
By Mart Crowley; directed by Joe Mantello; sets and costumes by David Zinn; lighting by Hugh Vanstone; sound by Leon Rothenberg; production stage manager, James Fitzsimmons; production management, Aurora Productions; general management, Bespoke Theatricals. Presented by David Stone, Scott Rudin, Patrick Catullo, Aaron Glick and Ryan Murphy.
Cast: Jim Parsons (Michael), Zachary Quinto (Harold), Matt Bomer (Donald), Andrew Rannells (Larry), Charlie Carver (Cowboy), Robin de Jesús (Emory), Brian Hutchison (Alan), Michael Benjamin Washington (Bernard) and Tuc Watkins (Hank).
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.