The Boys in the Band

The 2018 Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking portrayal of gay life in New York gets transferred from stage to Netflix with director Joe Mantello, producer Ryan Murphy, and the full revival cast intact. Fans of that acclaimed recent production will surely be overjoyed by this sparkly photographed version, but for devotees of the 1970 film directed by William Friedkin, which starred the original 1968 Off-Broadway cast, it’s a major disappointment. Consider me one of those devotees. I love single-set, real-time stage plays in which characters come together and verbally eviscerate each other despite their love for, or dependence on, the people with whom they must share space with. John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County, Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage (to name but a few) are exactly the type of show I love to see when I go to the theater. But heightened, intimate shows like these often make less than satisfying transitions to the big screen.

Mike Nichols’s 1966 film of Edward Albee’s Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is probably the greatest exception to that rule, but there are other fantastic pictures made from this type of decidedly theatrical material. Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band top that list. The director who would go on to make The French Connection and The Exorcist certainly had an innate ability to make stage-bound material feel cinematic, but part of what makes that film so incredibly is how perceptively it tackles its subject matter. Crowley was criticized for writing a play about homosexual self-hatred as much as he was lionized for writing about the real lives of gay men. The confrontational play can certainly be taken in many ways, but part of what makes the ’66 movie so fascinating is its time-capsule quality. It captures forever a key moment in New York gay culture, gay attitudes, and gay politics.

This new version, with a screenplay adaptation by Crowley and Ned Martel, makes very few changes to the original text. It in no way attempts to update the play by setting it in contemporary times or commenting directly on the fifty years of LGBTQ advancement that have transpired since the play was written. That’s welcome in a stage production—revivals of plays nearly always provide fresh perspectives without changing a word of text—but when a nearly perfect film (not just filmed record) of a play exists, there needs to be some artistic reason to make another version. Much has been made of the fact that every member of this cast is an openly gay actor. But in 2018, that hardly seems trailblazing. Far more meaningful is the fact that over half of the 1968 cast members were gay men taking a major professional risk by appearing in the play. And some of the actors were still closeted when they made the film. That’s extratextual information but knowing it enhances the pain and poignancy of the 1970 film. 

The only major structural differences between this movie and the original are a few clumsy flashbacks and a new epilogue, both of which sacrifice the play’s inherent claustrophobic tension for no visual or dramatic gain. So rather than a fascinating time capsule, we get a hollow period piece that seems more concerned with surface ’60s details than in any attempt to understand the mindset of an earlier era.