Skip to main content

Mart Crowley - An Obituary

Mart Crowley – Playwright, screen-writer, producer

Born August 21, 1935; died March 7, 2020


Mart Crowley, who has died aged 84, was a taboo-busting playwright, whose best-known work, The Boys in the Band, broke the mould of how gay life was depicted onstage. Taking its title from a line James Mason says to Judy Garland in A Star is Born, Crowley’s depiction of gay characters at a party to celebrate the birthday of one of them was a serious, grown-up dissection of inter-personal relationships that chimed with the rise of gay rights. Originally scheduled for a five-night off-Broadway run in 1968, it ended up playing for more than 1,000 performances, and and was said by some to have helped inspire the 1969 Stonewall riots. A film version directed by William Friedkin was released in 1970.

Edward Martino Crowley was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi to what he described as an alcoholic father and a drug-dependent hypochondriac mother. He studied drama at Catholic University in Washington, graduating in 1957. Back in Mississippi, he introduced himself to director Elia Kazan, who was filming Baby Doll there. Crowley talked his way into a job as a production assistant, and went on to work on Sidney Lumet’s film, The Fugitive Kind (1960), and another Kazan film, Splendour in the Grass (1961).

That film starred Natalie Wood, who Crowley was hired to drive her to the film set each day. The pair struck up a friendship, and after the shoot finished, she hired him as her assistant, primarily to give him enough free time to write. He ended up writing the The Boys in the Band while house-sitting for another wealthy friend, Diana Lynn.

While initially resisted by some theatre managements and agents for its frankness, Crowley’s play was championed by the likes of playwright Edward Albee and producer Richard Barr. While it was never Crowley’s intention for it to be an activist play, The Boys in the Band opened the door for a canon that included The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer and Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Crowley’s other plays included Remote Asylum (1970), the auto-biographical A Breeze from the Gulf (1973) and For Reasons that Remain Unclear (1993), about a sexually abusive Catholic priest.

Having become friends with Wood’s husband Robert Wagner, Crowley became executive script editor and then producer on detective show, Hart to Hart (1979-80), starring Wagner with Stefanie Powers. For film, he was one of several uncredited writers on John Carpenter’s Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), and for TV he penned There Must be a Pony (1986), starring Wagner and Elizabeth Taylor. Other TV movies included Bluegrass (1988) featuring Cheryl and Diane Ladd, and People Like Us (1990) with Ben Gazzara and Eva Marie Saint. Crowley also wrote episodes of Dynasty (1987) and The Colbys (1987), and a couple of Hart to Hart reunion specials (1995-1996).

Crowley’s sequel to The Boys in the Band, The Men from the Boys, premiered in 2002, catching up with the same characters thirty years on. A fiftieth anniversary Broadway production of Crowley’s original play featured The Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons in the cast, and won a Tony Award in 2019 for Best Revival. A new film version by Glee producer Ryan Murphy is being made for Netflix. This is testament enough to Crowley’s pioneering spirit with a play that gave voice to a community that took it as a cue to make their presence felt, loud and proud.

The Herald, April 8th 2020


 ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more