convergence-continuum Continues Season With THE BOYS IN THE BAND

convergence-continuum, continues its 2011 Season at the Liminis with Mart Crowley's 1968 ground-breaking play, The Boys in the Band.

The Boys in the Band premiered in 1968 and represents a major milestone in American theatre as the first play to openly portray the pleasures, miseries and private lives of gay men. Set in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment during a birthday party, the evening begins as a hilarious and spirited celebration among friends. It's all laughs, until an unexpected guest, too much alcohol and a truth-telling game reveal tensions that rip open the men's souls.

The Boys in the Band is directed by convergence-continuum company member, Tyson Douglas Rand. The casting is not the conventional take on the play, which has all the characters in their late twenties and early thirties. The convergence-continuum production portrays a more age-diverse group of friends, in part bridging the 43-year gap between 1968 and today, and features actors Curt Arnold, Benjamin Gregg, Zac Hudak, Jim Jarrell, Dan Kilbane, Clyde Simon, Jonathan Wilhelm, Bobby Williams and Scott Zolkowski.

The Boys in the Band opens Friday, October 7 and runs at 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through October 29 at the Liminis, 2438 Scranton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113 in the historic Tremont neighborhood. Tickets are $15 general admission, $12 for seniors (65+) and $10 for students. Reservations and information are available at 216-687-0074 and www.convergence-continuum.org.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

The Playwright: Mart Crowley

Martino (shortened to Mart) Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1935, the only child of devout Catholic parents. He attended Catholic school in Vicksburg and went on to graduate from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Crowley then headed west to Hollywood. There he worked for a number of television production companies before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film Inside Daisy Clover. Crowley became part of Wood's and husband Robert Wagner's inner circle of friends. Wood hired him as her assistant, primarily to give him ample free time to work on his gay-themed play The Boys in the Band, which opened off-Broadway to ecstatic reviews on April 14, 1968 and enjoyed a run of 1001 performances.

Crowley's second work, Remote Asylum, was mounted with great expectations at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in 1970, but it failed to garner the raves his debut had. In that same year, he enjoyed greater success with his motion picture adaptation of The Boys in the Band. With his next play, the autobiographical A Breeze from the Gulf, he regained cachet with the critics and earned a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award nomination for Best Play.

In 1979 and 1980, Crowley served first as the executive script editor and then producer of the ABC series Hart to Hart, starring Natalie Wood's husband Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. Other credits include the teleplays for There Must Be a Pony (1986), Bluegrass (1988), People Like Us (1990), and a Hart to Hart reunion special in 1996. The Men From the Boys, his sequel to The Boys in the Band was produced by the New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco in 2002, and by the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles in 2003.

Crowley has appeared in at least two documentaries: The Celluloid Closet (1995), about homosexuality and its depiction on screen throughout the years, and Dominick Dunne: After the Party (2007), a biography of Crowley's friend and producer, Dominick Dunne.

The Play: The Boys in the Band

Set in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment during a birthday party, the evening begins as a hilarious and spirited celebration among friends. The guest of honor is Harold, who is glum about getting older and losing his looks. Michael, the host, is uncomfortable about his sexuality and undergoing psychoanalysis, as is guest Donald, a conflicted friend who has moved to the suburbs to spurn the gay lifestyle. Other guests include Bernard, an African-American who still pines for the wealthy white boy in the house where his mother worked as a maid; interior-decorator Emory, who is openly and extremely flamboyant and the most stereotypical of the group. Also attending are Larry, who is an aggressively sexual player and Hank, who passes as straight: a couple living together but disagreeing on the issue of monogamy. Rounding out The Revelers is "Cowboy," a young, attractive, but less than bright, hustler who is Emory's gift to Harold. It's all laughs, until an unexpected guest, Alan (Michael's straight college friend), too much alcohol and a truth-telling game reveal tensions that rip open the men's souls.

The Boys in the Band was the first play to prominently feature a large cast of gay characters taking center stage in leading roles. It performed incredibly well for an off-Broadway production, running for over 1,000 performances in five years, to critical acclaim and box-office success. The Boys in the Band debuted in 1968, more than a year before the infamous Stonewall riots that prompted the widespread gay rights movement, defining playwright Mart Crowley's status as a trailblazer. The Boys in the Band broke new ground as the first mainstream play, and the first major Hollywood production, to include a full cast of gay characters and to deal realistically with homosexuality. Before that time, plays and films portrayed homosexuals as either clowns or victims who typically ended up dead or converted to heterosexuality by the final scene.

Crowley's play, about a group of gay men who gather for a friend's birthday party, was divisive in the gay community. It was the first real display of homosexuality in mainstream entertainment, and some gay people disagreed with what the play represented. The characters were variously flamboyant, sex-obsessed, closeted, overwhelmingly bitchy, or self-hating, and many gay critics would have preferred to assert a more wholesome, less controversial window into the community. But over the years many have come to appreciate The Boys in the Band as a documentary of pre-liberation times, and as more of an indictment of society's homophobia than of gay men themselves. Regardless of the opposition, straight and gay audiences alike loved the play, and in 1970, it was converted into a film, with all of the original cast members from the stage show intact. In 1996, the show had an off-Broadway revival, and again achieved success.

The convergence-continuum production is produced by special arrangement with Samuel French. Inc..
The Company: convergence-continuum

The Boys in the Band is the company's 44th production, and is the fifth of six productions in the 2011 Season (our tenth!). The company's season runs March - December, with a hiatus over the Winter. Many of the cast and crew of The Boys in the Band have been involved in previous convergence-continuum productions in many and various capacities. The company seeks to create a core ensemble that continues to work together over the long term in exploring and developing its artistic voice and performance and production practices to create up-close, environmentally-staged productions that challenge the status quo and extend the boundaries of theatre. At convergence-continuum our broad goal remains to confront, engage, and challenge audiences to share in the imaginative and investigative process of making their own cultural meanings--and we believe a strong, vibrant, Living Theatre does this. We believe that such a theatre engages those who participate and encourages more creative thinking about the cultural problems that we all face today. Our performance space, the Liminis, is a transcendent space where the world isn't reflected, but can be penetrated, explored, and experienced in new, often highly unique ways.