Mart Crowley (born August 21, 1935)

[reviews_and_ramblings]

Mart Crowley (born August 21, 1935) is an American playwright.

Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi. After graduating from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. in 1957, Crowley headed west to Hollywood, where he worked for a number of television production companies before meeting Natalie Wood on the set of her film Inside Daisy Clover. 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 became part of Wood's inner circle of friends that she called "the nucleus", whose main requirement was that they pass a "kindness" test.

Crowley's sequel to The Boys in the Band was entitled The Men From The Boys.

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 the 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. 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.

In 1979 and 1980, Crowley served first as the executive script editor and then producer of the ABC series Hart to Hart, starring 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.

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.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart_Crowley  


Mart Crowley, 1986, by Robert Giard (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/brbldl_getrec.asp?fld=img&id=1123765)

American photographer Robert Giard is renowned for his portraits of American poets and writers; his particular focus was on gay and lesbian writers. Some of his photographs of the American gay and lesbian literary community appear in his groundbreaking book Particular Voices: Portraits of Gay and Lesbian Writers, published by MIT Press in 1997. Giard’s stated mission was to define the literary history and cultural identity of gays and lesbians for the mainstream of American society, which perceived them as disparate, marginal individuals possessing neither. In all, he photographed more than 600 writers. (http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/giard.html)

Further Readings:

The Collected Plays of Mart Crowley
Paperback: 485 pages
Publisher: Alyson Books (November 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1593501463
Amazon: The Collected Plays of Mart Crowley

Available for the first time, the complete plays of Boys in the Band author Mart Crowley, timed to coincide with the first New York production of Boys in more than a dozen years, along with the New York premiere of its sequel, Men from the Boys.

These six plays—all professionally produced and two never before published—interrelate and revive the protagonist of the explosive gay drama Boys in the Band in his relationships with his family and friends, both gay and straight.

Mart Crowley is an acclaimed playwright, television producer, and children’s book author who lives in New York.

The Boys in the Band: 40th Anniversary Edition by Mart Crowley
Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Alyson Books; 40 Anv edition (April 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1593500750
Amazon: The Boys in the Band: 40th Anniversary Edition

“Boys can still hold its own . . . [Mart] Crowley’s point is about how the humor is shaped and defined by the pain.”—The New York Times

The Boys in the Band was the first commercially successful play to reveal gay life to mainstream America. Alyson is proud to release a special fortieth anniversary edition of the play, which includes an original preface by acclaimed writer Tony Kushner (Angels in America), along with previously unpublished photographs of Mart Crowley and the cast of the play/film.

Mart Crowley’s other plays include the autobiographical A Breeze from the Gulf (1973) and The Men from the Boys (2002).

Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality On Stage by Nicholas de Jongh
Paperback: 236 pages
Publisher: Routledge (May 14, 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415033632
ISBN-13: 978-0415033633
Amazon: Not in Front of the Audience: Homosexuality On Stage

A pioneering study of the theatre's treatment of homosexuals and homosexuality from the 1920s to the present day. Only in the 60s did theatres confront heterosexual prejudice and in the wake of AIDS, the issue is once again highly charged.

More Particular Voices at my website: http://www.elisarolle.com/, My Ramblings/Particular Voices