The Boys In The Band (play)

The Boys in the Band
Poster for the 1996 off-Broadway revival
Written by	Mart Crowley
Characters	Hank Alan Bernard Cowboy Michael Harold Emory Donald Larry
Date premiered	April 14, 1968
Place premiered	Theatre Four New York City, New York, United States
Original language	English
Genre	Drama

The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley. The off-Broadway production, directed by Robert Moore, opened on April 14, 1968 at Theater Four, where it ran for more than 1,000 performances. The cast included Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter White as Alan, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry, Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard.

The play was adapted into a feature film of the same name by Cinema Center Films in 1970. In 2002, Crowley wrote a sequel to the play, The Men from the Boys, which takes place thirty years after the original.

During the play, which is set in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, backgrounds of characters are discovered during a birthday party.

Harold's six closest friends are:

During the party, one humor takes a nasty turn, as the nine men become increasingly inebriated. The party culminates in a game, where each man must call someone and tell him he loves him. Michael, believing that Alan has finally "outed" himself when he makes his call, realizes that Alan's wife is the recipient of Alan's call when he grabs the phone away from Alan. The audience never learns what Alan intended to discuss with Michael in the end.

According to Crowley's friend Gavin Lambert, actress Natalie Wood, who sympathized with Hollywood's gay scene, financially supported Crowley, who is himself gay, so he would be free to write his play. The playwright, who first met her while working as a production assistant on the movie Splendor in the Grass, worked as an assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner for many years.