bellamy on broadway

'Boys in Band' Has Gallows Humor

By PETER BELLAMY NEW YORK Although one of New York's drama critics has used the phrase "screamingly funny" in reference to the play "The Boys in the Band," it's actually as funny as a newly dug.grave.

It's about homosexuals and their tragic sterile loves, transitory emotional

relationships and their ceaseless, furtive running up and down blind alleys.

This play at Theater Four is harrowing and magnificently acted. It is tragedy in the Greek sense in that its homosexual characters cannot help themselves in regard to their preference for their own sex anymore than they can discuss their loves openly.

There is a deal of laughter in the play, but it's all desperate, gallows humor.

The drama is not for those whose teeth are set on edge by the sight of men dancing cheek to cheek, nor for those who are offended by the constant use of profanity or a complete vocabulary of four letter words.

HOWEVER, the profanity and obscenities are not. injected just for shock. They are utilized as so many homosexuals use them as a kind of forced whistlingpast-the-graveyard humor. As one of the characters says: "You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."

Playwright Mart Crowley

in his first play displays an amazing knowledge of homosexuals. His play is valid as an incisive and pitiful insight into the insecurities, fears, petty quarrels, passionate jealousies, and heartbreak of soul and experience of such men.

He presents their hysterical emotional outbursts and their sad, hopeless efforts to compete with women on the basis of femininity. One feels desperately sorry for

them as they ponder to their graves what accident of heredity or environment made them sexual outcasts.

Conflict of the play comes with the arrival at a homosexual birthday party of ansexual birthday party of an apparently heterosexual married man. The host, with a recruiting zeal not unknown to the breed, tries brutally to force him to admit he's a homosexual.

THE PLAYWRIGHT has characterized homosexual types with unmerciful accuracy.

Kenneth Nelson lends wicked charm to the role of wicked charm to the role of the jet set homosexual, a handsome sybarite with the

corrosive temperament of a character in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" At the end he almost vomits in self-pity. It's a performance of award-winning caliber.

terpart of life as the mincTom Aldredge is a counthè pish humor. Reuben Greene ing, lisping fag with a wasevokes sympathy as the sensitive Negro, who doesn't "Queen of Spades," since resent being called the homosexuality has set him

apart more than color.

Robert La Tourneaux is unpleasantly real as a muscular male prostitute. Keith Prentice is coldly repulsive who glories in keeping his as the pseudo-intellectual lovers in spiritual as well as sexual thralldom.

Arthur Roberts enacts the nether-world one who has just left his wife and children after unhappiness as a heterosexual. William Leet registers the insatiabilty of a satyr in his sexual desire for all types and conditions of men. Frederick Combs is the brooding type:

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Director Robert Moore directs the cast with complete understanding of homosexuals, with their usual high I.Q., their wit and despair.