CELEBRATE! A scene from the 2018 Broadway production of "The Boys in the Band" at the Booth Theater. The host, Michael (Jim Parsons), fourth from left, is getting intoxicated after five weeks on the wagon.
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THE FIRST TIME I SAW "The Boys in the Band" (it was the movie version, 1970, at Loews Tower East), I thought Emory's rhetorical cocktail-hour question was the funniest line I'd ever heard.
"Who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?"
To appreciate that, you'd have to know that the F-word wasn't bandied about in 1970 -- in film, onstage or in what we still half-quaintly/half-ironically called polite company -- the way it is now. So the humor was double-barreled. Despite that reaction and that memory, I'd never thought about "The Boys in the Band" as a play about drinking. But it is.
POSTER BOYS Leonard Frey, left, as Harold, and Robert La Tourneaux as the "midnight cowboy." The entire cast of the Off Broadway production appeared in the film version. Mart Crowley insisted.
The play is best known, as it should be, for what was different and daring about it. It showed gay characters in their natural habitat, a lively, flirty, witty birthday party at a duplex on the Upper East Side of Manhattan where the guest of honor's surprise gift is a boyishly pretty $20 hustler. (Adjust for inflation.)
Elsewhere, the most brilliant gay playwrights of the century, from Tennessee Williams to Edward Albee, were channeling their messages through heterosexual characters. Blanche and Stanley. George and Martha. Others.
But from beginning to end, Mart Crowley's comic social drama is also a comment on alcohol consumption.
Here's the plot: A circle of friends, all gay men, gather at Michael's apartment for Harold's 32nd-birthday party. Inconveniently, Alan, a college friend of Michael's, is in town and seems desperate to come over and talk about something serious. The complication: He's straight and doesn't know about Michael's sexuality.
2018: SHALL WE DANCE? Zachary Quinto, left, as Harold and Robin DeJésus as the Cowboy in the Broadway production.
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Trying to hide who his friends really are, so Alan won't realize the awful truth of his own sexuality, is too much for Michael, who pours himself a drink, although he'd given up booze five weeks ago. Alcohol quickly turns Michael bitchy and cruel. Before you know it, he's insisting on a telephone game in which each man calls the one person he's loved all his life and confesses his feelings. Everyone who plays seems to regret it. But then Michael's plan to prove that Alan is really a closet case backfires.
At the end, Harold leaves with his baby-faced hustler, Larry and Hank are upstairs having makeup sex, and Emory helps an emotionally crushed Bernard home. Michael collapses in tears of self-loathing, which was considered a universal characteristic of gay men at the time. Thus, lines like: "You show me a happy homosexual, and I'll show you a gay corpse."
2018: THE PARTY'S OVER Parsons, left, and Matt Bomer as his ex, Donald, in the Broadway production.
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The first mention of drinking comes five minutes in. when Donald balks at the idea of picking up ice on his way to the party and Michael, whose apartment is the party venue, tells him that if he wants a cold martini, he'll do what he's told. In the play, "You wanna drink?" is the fifth line in the script. Five pages later, Donald takes his first sip and reacts: "Oh, Christ, is that good!"
"The Boys in the Band" is very specific about its poisons. Out on the deck, where the party munchies are being put out, there's a discussion about what sort of person drinks beer and what sort drinks sherry. Someone orders a vodka tonic. Michael tells Harold that he's bought him a special bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé.
1968: ORIGINAL CAST From left, Cliff Gorman, Frederick Combs, Frey, Keith Prentice, Reuben Greene, La Tourneaux (seated) and Laurence Luckinbill in the Off Broadway production.
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When Alan (the straight friend) arrives, he has scotch (product placement opp: it's J&B in the movie). In fact, he has several scotches. And he punches Emory, which is apparently what midcentury straight men did whenever they'd had a few. (See "A Streetcar Named Desire," next month on Press Nights, Part 4 in a series.) Emory has been annoying Alan all evening by being "effeminate."
So Alan is our Belligerent Drunk. Michael, who is so anxiety-ridden after Alan hits Emory that he pours himself a gin, is a classic Mean Drunk. He insults the Cowboy (the hustler, whom Emory bought for the night as a gift for Harold). "Stuff your mouth, so you can't say anything" is one of his pieces of advice. (The Cowboy has so far proven himself not to be all that bright.)
1968: 'I KNOW ABOUT YOU AND JUSTIN' Fully into his rant as the mean drunk, Michael (Kenneth Nelson), left, takes out his frustrations on Alan (Peter White), a longtime friend who he wants to believe is gay too. The quieter drinkers watching and judging are Donald (Combs), seated, and Hank (Luckinbill).
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Michael also spews venom at Harold, telling him everything that's wrong with him and revealing his secrets. One of those is Harold's stash of Nembutal. which he is gradually amassing, in case he decides to commit suicide.
Harold, who drinks a little but mostly smokes weed during the evening (it was called grass then), is also brutally mean. But it seems to be his default personality, not a result of any altered state.
Hank -- who, instructed to telephone the person he's loved forever, calls his current lover -- is a classic sentimental drunk, but that's another story.
In the end, if heterosexual 20th-century audiences wanted reassurance that gay people were Just Like Us, this tale of anger, impulsive physical violence, jealousy, betrayal and despair was a damned good start.
THE BOYS IN THE BAND, Booth Theater, 222 West 45th Street; telecharge.com. 1 hour 50 minutes (no intermission). Limited run: Closes on Aug. 11.