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The play concerns seven guys at a birthday bash in a midtown Manhattan apartment. As the liquor flows, so do the bitchy witticisms and bilious expressions of self-hatred. Though the conceit was familiar–not least of all from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—The Boys in the Band pioneered a new openness about the gay subculture, with its campy humor and sexual explicitness, paving the way for such works as Angels in America, A Chorus Line, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and the 1992 Chicago hit Party, which, like The Boys in the Band, depicted a group of gay guys playing a “Truth or Dare”-like game.
Directed by Robert Moore, the original production featured a nine-member ensemble of relative unknowns. Among them: Kenneth Nelson, who’d played the romantic lead in the premiere of another off-Broadway landmark, The Fantasticks; Laurence Luckinbill, who would come to be known for playing Sybok in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier; Cliff Gorman, who subsequently starred as Lenny Bruce in the Broadway hit Lenny; and Leonard Frey, who was later Oscar-nominated for his portrayal of the timid tailor Motel in Fiddler on the Roof. Nelson and Frey, along with several other Boys in the Band cast members, ultimately died of AIDS. (Boze Hadleigh offers a gossipy backstage look at “The Curse of The Boys in the Band” in his book Broadway Babylon.)
