From
1964 to 1966, he was secretary for actress Natalie Wood. Mart Crowley
is primarily known for his landmark play, The Boys in the Band, written
in 1968, which deals with male homosexual lifestyles. From almost every
critical view, the play was praised by critics and Crowley was
acknowledged as a master composer of economical, pungent and
bitingly-humorous dialogue.

In
April of 1968 Bernie and I went to a preview of  “The Boys In The Band”
and after the curtain came down I was awe struck. There up on the stage
for the first time I had seen men I knew--gay men--as they had never
been presented before. Today, in 2010, many gay people say the show is
‘dated’, that those men don’t represent the gay men of today. I disagree
and can take you to any gay bar, gay party, gay gathering of any kind
and show you a Harold, a Emory, a cowboy and, yes, even an Alan.  After
42 more years of theatre going, and hundreds of drama, this play still
ranks in my top 5 and I watch the movie version at least once a year.


This is the thirty-seventh post in a series highlighting the best
gay and lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and
after that period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the
history of gay people telling what life is, and was, during an important
time of history.

Biography of Mart Crowley
with some notes from Brooke Shannon

Crowley
is a playwright who was born on August 21, 1935, in Vicksburg,
Mississippi. He attended a Catholic high school in his hometown and
graduated from Catholic University of America in 1957 in Washington D.C.
In the 1960's, he worked in California for many television companies.
Some of them included Martin Manulis Productions and Four Star
Television.

The Boys in the Band is a play by Mart Crowley. The
off-Broadway production, directed by Robert Moore, opened on April 14,
1968 at Theater Four, where it ran for 1,001 performances, an extremely
healthy run for both an off-Broadway production and one not geared to a
mainstream audience. The cast included Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Peter
White as Alan, Leonard Frey as Harold, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Frederick
Combs as Donald, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Keith Prentice as Larry,
Robert La Tourneaux as Cowboy, and Reuben Greene as Bernard.


The
Boys in the Band is bitter, bitchy, and scathing in the tradition of
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the Bette Davis film
All About Eve. According to Crowley's friend Gavin Lambert, actress
Natalie Wood, who sympathized with Hollywood's gay scene, financially
supported Crowley, himself a homosexual, so he would be free to write
his play. The playwright, who first met her while working as a
production assistant on the movie Splendor in the Grass, worked as an
assistant for Wood and her husband Robert Wagner .




Crowley
admits that his plays are autobiographical. In his introduction to 3
Plays by Mart Crowley, he refers to The Boys in the Band and says,
"There was never a real birthday party attended by nine actual
men...However, just before I began to write the play, I had...attended a
party for a friend's birthday and it gave me the idea of how to frame
what had already been on my mind...All of the characters are based on
people I either knew well or are amalgams of several I'd known to
varying degrees, plus a large order of myself thrown into the mix." A
Breeze from the Gulf is based on his relationship with his parents but
it has been "pushed and pulled, fictionalized and dramatized, and
...personalized." The fictional Michael is in many ways Mart Crowley.
Teddy is Crowley's father and Lorraine is his mother.

From 1979
to 1980 he served as the executive script editor for the ABC series
"Hart to Hart" and later as the producer. In the early 1980's Crowley
returned to television production in California, writing the television
movie adaptation of James Kirkwood's There Must Be a Pony. In 1996, he
performed in The Celluloid Closet, which was nominated for an Emmy. He
has most recently collaborated in the publication of a children's book
called "Eloise Takes a Bawth, " a creation of Kay Thompson. After
writing "Eloise in Moscow," Thompson and Hilary Knight went to Rome
where they worked on the book for four years. Playwright Mart Crowley
lived in Rome nearby and visited them, adding his creative talents.
Despite the fact that "Eloise Takes a Bawth" was cataloged by Harper and
Row in 1964, the book was never published. Thompson died, but in 2001,
Thompson's heirs decided finally to publish "Eloise Takes a Bawth."
Hilary Knight again set to work creating art from sketches he'd drawn
forty years before. Matt Crowley pieced together the many drafts of Kay
Thompson's text. Her niece and nephew and the editors at Simon &
Schuster succeeded in publishing the book with the help of Crowley.

Matt
Crowley wrote a sequel to The Boys In The Band called The Men From The
Boys which opened to negative reviews in San Francisco a couple of years
ago but the former will be revived in New York this coming season.