The Boys in the Band (2020) — Review

Mart Crowley’s 1968 work, The Boys In The Band, has now sashayed its way from an initial thousand performance Off-Broadway run into LGBTQ cultural history: groundbreaking upon its premiere for its open and often unforgiving look at the exuberance and the shame of the gay experience in postwar New York, the play’s all-star, all-openly gay anniversary revival fifty years later was swiftly snapped up for adaptation by Netflix.

Retaining the Broadway cast, its director Joe Mantello, and the original playwright as scriptwriter, the filmed version of The Boys In the Band minces elegantly deeper into the proverbial celluloid closet. The script’s evident age and live-theatre qualities, combined with the central antagonism of Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto- two actors known just as much for marquee roles in The Big Bang Theory and American Horror Story, respectively, as for being openly gay- form a perfectly discomfiting setup for a work concerned with identity performance.

The agonizing spectacle of the rival “queens” dueling it out for a sliver of control over their corner of society- armed with Judy Garland quotes and Bette Davis imitations- gains more than the average big-budget stage production might from its ensemble of Hollywood actors, for whom the central theme- the dual joy and repression of performance- seems all too believable.

The Boys in the Band- itself a quote from Judy Garland movie A Star Is Born- revolves around the New York apartment of Michael (Jim Parsons), a tightly-buttoned, debt-riddled gay man preparing to host a birthday party for his friendship group. Most of the gathering guests, based on the playwright’s real circle, illustrate typical gay figures in the scene at the time, including Donald (Matt Bomer), Michael’s conflicted friend-slash-lover who has moved away from the city, attempting to repress his homosexual tendencies in the suburbs; Larry (Andrew Rannells) and Hank (Tuc Watkins), a cohabiting couple fraught by Larry’s swinging tastes and Hank’s former life as a married, straight-passing father; Emory (Robin de Jesús) and Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington), a flamboyant interior decorator and reserved African-American librarian, respectively; and, memorably, ‘Cowboy’ (Charlie Carver) a luscious young rent boy acquired as a birthday present for the guest of honour, Harold (Zachary Quinto) . With the final addition of the ghost at the feast- Alan (Brian Hutchinson), Michael’s ambiguously straight college roommate- the party devolves into a scathing examination of the different faces which the characters use to disguise their self-loathing.

While Crowley’s material feels dated and formulaic at times- with the use of racist and anti-Semitic slurs, and exposition from Michael in the form of a melodramatic soliloquy closing with “finis, applause”- the very performative nature of the scenario, combined with the familiar faces in the casts, serves to hammer home its comment on the shame enforced on the gay community, then as now. On keeping the slurs in the text, director Mantello argued that that “my responsibility is to the story. And the story is: This the cost of oppression, it allows you to act in a way that is inhumane. And I felt in order to be honest to that, that you’re true to that, that it was essential that we keep it.” The sadistic party game which Michael inflicts on his guests- another form of performance to assert a semblance of control over the self-loathing which pervades the entire film- brings out not only the ugly, painful dynamics of the group onscreen, but their contemporary resonances.