THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN
“Call you tomorrow,” the ennui-laden Harold tells his host, Michael, as he leaves his birthday party, where they’ve engaged in vicious parlor games that would make Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ’s George and Martha blanch. The line is, of course, from Mart Crowley’s 1968 play The Boys in the Band, about a friend group of gay men who drink, smoke, snipe, and parry in a single evening. They even get in some dancing and laughing as they air dirty laundry as Harold arrives late to his party.
The latest iteration of Crowley’s landmark text is the upcoming Netflix film produced by Ryan Murphy, helmed by legendary theater director Joe Mantello, who directed the 2018 Broadway production that famously starred a cast of only out queer men. Since he wrote it, Crowley’s
