Clear eye for the queer guy

The cast of Boys in the Band. Back from left: Fasitua Amosa, Edwin Wright, Jake Lindesay, Craig Hall, Edward Peni, Heath Jones. Front: Simon London, Shane Bosher, Stephen Butterworth. Picture / Richard Robinson

When Jonathon Hendry first saw Boys In the Band, he was a young gay activist watching a much debated film on video in his student flat in Wellington.

The original stage-play had been written in 1968, a year before gay liberation erupted into mainstream American consciousness with a series of skirmishes between homosexuals and police in New York's Greenwich Village, which would become known as the Stonewall Riots.

The off-Broadway play was considered a landmark piece of theatre, the first aimed at a mainstream audience to portray homosexuality realistically.

But Hendry's fellow activists in 1970s Wellington were not so sure the resulting film was doing their cause any favours.

"It was a complex issue," says Hendry. "Boys In the Band was not looked on favourably at the time. Yes, it was ground-breaking, but it was seen as a bad evocation of homosexual life, presenting a very stereotyped image, showing gay men being drunk and vicious."

But the play stayed with Hendry, and now, after many years of considering directing a production of it, he is doing just that at the Silo Theatre.

"Twenty-five years after it was written, there was a reappraisal of the play, and the feeling emerged that it was a lot better than its reputation would suggest. Since then, it has enjoyed a renaissance.

"It is a great American play, albeit as a piece of entertainment, not art. Very funny, with fantastic dialogue. The characters really leap off the page, and there are lovely scenes of the frailty and absurdity of human nature."

Hendry has altered the seating of the Silo, to draw the audience right into the action of the play. Set at a birthday party at an upmarket Greenwich Village apartment, seven gay men are joined unexpectedly by two straight visitors. As the night progresses and the alcohol flows, the good-natured banter turns spiteful.

"It's like one of those dinner parties that everyone has been to, where it all gets a little drunk and out of control and the host gets a little nasty. A valid comparison has been made between Boys In the Band and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf."

The bitchy banter was one of the elements that displeased gay activists, who argued the play perpetuated negative stereotypes. Playwright Mart Crowley argued it reflected an era when homosexuality was considered a crime and a certifiable mental illness.

Hendry believes Crowley was astute in pitching his play, and always had straight audiences in mind, and later, the film censors.

"There is a universality to Boys In the Band, but it is about a particular milieu. It is very gay and very male, but I think he wrote it with an eye to the mainstream, something people could find accessible.

"When he wrote the play, he was unemployed but writing B-grade screenplays in Hollywood. When he wrote the screenplay, I think he also had an eye to the censors. In 1970, when the movie came out, two British films about Oscar Wilde couldn't be shown, yet Boys In the Band got through."

And Hendry believes Crowley succeeded in making the play accessible.

"It has issues in it everyone can relate to: growing up to realise your potential - or not; challenging us to look at how much we have grown up both as a gay society and a mainstream society; and how much we conform or fit into the norm as individuals, an idea which had as much currency for the straight actors as well as the gay actors in the play when we discussed it in rehearsal.

"I'm interested in showing the play to the audience as a time capsule. It does have anachronisms in it, seen from today. But it has themes many people can relate to.

"I want to hear feedback from gay audiences who come and see it, to know whether they consider it relevant. I want to talk to older people, who lived through the era, the issues and the things that happened. I want to know if younger audiences find it relevant.

"But most of all, I hope it will attract people who like a damn fine piece of entertainment."

* Boys In The Band at the Silo Theatre, from tonight until July 2