'Bent' may be '79s' worst on Broadway

By Jay Sharbutt

AP drama critic

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NEW YORK Really bad dramas don't come along all that often on Broadway. But "Bent," starring rising young actor Richard Gere, may easily qualify as the worst of 1979.

Seems that not only did he whoop it up the previous night, he brought home a sturdy, blond-haired chap (whom he called his "little storm trooper") and spent the night with him.

SS men arrive. They're taking part in Hitler's infamous "night of the long knives," purging homosexuals in the

to be identified as a Jew, not a homosexual, he arrives at the concentration camp.

There, he meets an inmate (David Dukes) who tried to help him on the train. Dukes wears a pink triangular badge identifying him as a homosexual. He sardonically explains he's in the

would "make queers legal."

It seeks to dramatize the fact that homosexuals, like Jews, were persemilitary and the friends of same. The camp because he signed a petition that led unmercifully in Nazi Germany, visitor tries to flee, is shot and his many winding up marked for death in throat is slit. Hitler's concentration camps.

But even with a few scenes of genuine shock and horror, it proves a badly done, unbelievable tale of homosexual love marked by dialog that is mundane, grotesque or just awful, depending on the moment.

Gere plays a young, dissolute hustler who lives in a seedy Berlin apartment with his lover (David Marshall Grant), a

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The two never get together physiGere and Grant escape. In time, making in extremely graphic terms cally. But they start fantasizing lovethough, they're caught. while standing at rigid attention during three-minute "rest periods" in their 12hour day.

They're put on a train headed to a concentration camp. A drunk SS captain, who apparently didn't get word of their sexual preference, suspects Grant is a homosexual. He and his thugs savagely beat him.

He forces Gere to do likewise, re-

dancer. The play opens with Gere sufsulting in Grant's death. And, after striking a sick bargain with the officer

fering from a severe hangover.

drop. The proceedings finally end on a The curtain takes a long time to predictably tragic note for both lovers.

For the record, the play is by Martin Sherman. The direction, which gives the play a slow, often stultifying pace, is by Robert Allan Ackerman. Robert Allan Ackerman.