GET MART! Crowley’s opus was rooted in pre-Stonewall identity.

Photograph: Robert Giaro

Gay plays are a staple on and Off Broadway today, but when Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band debuted in 1968, a show about thirtysomething queens being catty at a party was revolutionary. And much appreciated—Boys ran at Theater Four on 55th Street for a staggering 1,000 performances. Following a 40th-anniversary reading on Monday 16, Crowley discusses the play’s legacy with original cast members Laurence Luckinbill and Peter White (and Dominick Dunne, who produced the 1970 film version). But I couldn’t wait till then, so I rang Crowley up at his midtown home to dish.

When you were writing Boys, did you think of yourself as a gay activist?
Well no, but I guess there must have been something going on. Before Boys, I did a screenplay that had Natalie Wood playing twins, and one of them was a lesbian. And I did a pilot for Bette Davis where she played this Auntie Mame–style decorator with Paul Lynde for an assistant. They ended up filming it with a woman, but I guess there was something in my mind about using gay characters. I was really encouraged by a piece Stanley Kaufmann wrote for the Times, where he decried the work of three of the biggest playwrights of day, saying they were all gay and [asking] why their work was more or less coded. Basically, that somebody oughta let it all hang out. So I thought, That’s a damn good idea, and it started coming together. This was the summer of ’67.

What was the reaction when you shopped it around?
People seriously thought I had lost my mind. It was hard as hell getting anyone to take it seriously. The agent who eventually helped me get it made didn’t want anything to do with it at first. She said "My God, what is this thing you've brought me? I can't send this out under company letterhead—it's like some weekend at Fire Island!” I asked her to send it to Richard Barr, who produced Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I figured anyone who produced Virginia Woolf wouldn't blink at this. She said, “I'll send it to him just to see what he thinks—but not on letterhead!” She called me the next morning, stunned as anyone, and said, "Can you have a drink with Richard Barr and Edward Albee tonight? They run a workshop in the Village and they're interested in doing your play. That was November 1967, and we opened in January 1968. The workshop was an enormous success, and then Richard produced it Off Broadway in April of that year.

As the gay community has evolved, reactions to the play have changed. It seems to alternate between being embraced and scorned.

I didn’t have any particular agenda or attitude. It was a very personal statement—I just put down what I felt. If people disagree, it doesn’t faze me because that’s the way I saw things. When they did the revival in 1996, Ben Brantley said, "Apparently it's okay to like The Boys in the Band again.” Tony Kushner did a marvelous introduction to the 40th-anniversary reprinting of the text, where he really pins down the different kinds of reactions to it. Young people today have no problem with it because they're so liberated. They can't imagine it could ever have been like that. And, hey, nobody winds up committing suicide in the third act, like they used to always have to.

The conceit of having a group of gay men come together and nitpick at each others’ foibles has been borrowed by hundreds of playwrights since then. Are you flattered or irritated?
Oh, God! [Laughs] I don't care—If they can't think of a way into it without taking the paradigm of the play, I think it just reflects on a lack of imagination.

Mart Crowley appears at A Night with The Boys in the Band on Mon, Jun 16.