It now seems inevitable that Jack Cummings III would direct the New York City revival of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band. ( The last one, at the WPA Theatre, happened in 1996. ) While Cummings, 41, had just moved to the city in 1996 and missed the production, he would eventually find work in 2006 as assistant to Dominick Dunne. At the time, Dunne's third act as a crime writer for Vanity Fair had brought him a new wave of fame. In previous career incarnations, he had been an author and a television film producer. In 1970, he was executive producer of the film version of The Boys in the Band.
While assisting Dunne, Cummings, a Richmond, Va., native, was quickly developing a name for himself with a fledgling theater company named Transport Group. Mart Crowley had just moved back to New York City and was in touch with his friend and former executive producer of Boys. One day, Dunne told his assistant, "You should do the Boys in the Band." Dunne went one better and introduced Cummings to Crowley.
"I know that Dominick was incredibly close with Mart and very, very fond of him," said the artistic director, a Drama Desk Award winner. "And he completely believed in the piece and that's why he wanted to produce it. And I think that Mart trusted him and Dominick trusted Mart."
A bit of theatrical magic intervened at this point. Cummings knew Buddy Thomas at ICM, who represents the estate of playwright William Inge. They became friends when Transport staged the late playwright's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Not soon after Dunne's suggestion, Thomas called. It was 2008 and four decades since the original Theatre Four production of the Crowley classic. Thomas, also Crowley's agent, asked Cummings, "Would you be interested in doing a 40th-anniversary production of Boys in the Band?"
Cummings was torn; he had already mapped out his theatrical season. But the ambitious artistic director agreed to stage a celebration of the play to celebrate the milestone. In June of 2008, a reading of the play at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Christopher Street drew a sell-out house. Among the actors were Malcolm Gets, Jonathan Hammond, Norm Lewis and David Greenspan. It was followed by a panel discussion, moderated by veteran Village Voice theatre critic and author Michael Feingold. On the dais were Mart Crowley and Boys in the Band cast members Peter White and Lawrence Luckinbill.
"The night went over really spectacularly," Cummings said. A week later, he decided he would mount a revival of the show for 2010.
As Cummings developed the show, he spent time in discussions with Crowley about how to develop the work for a new generation of theatergoers. Those discussions took a bittersweet tone last August, when Dominick Dunne died at age 83. Cummings and Crowley spent time together, mourning their mutual friend.
"We have definitely been kind of side by side," Cummings said, explaining the growing friendship that has developed between he and Crowley in their combined efforts to restage the show. In fact, the playwright has sat in on several auditions and offered his opinion on various casting choices. Cummings decided that the staging will be complemented by readings of lesser-known Crowley plays.
"Over the long haul I've come to be very friendly with Jack and his wife," Mart Crowley said. "He's married to an actress named Barbara Walsh. She's a singer. They know everybody; every young [ actor ] . There's no one in the cast who was born when the thing was written. No; they're not old enough."
The Transport Group's production will feature Jonathan Hammond as Michael, Christopher Innvar as Larry, Kevin Isola as Alan, Jon Levenson as Harold, Kevyn Morrow as Bernard, Graham Rowat as Hank, Aaron Sharff as Cowboy, John Wellmann as Emory and Nick Westrate as Donald.
As a heterosexual man who was an infant the year of the Stonewall Riots, Cummings had to plumb the text for his own meaning: he decided to depict the play as a historic piece as well as a timeless character study.
"It's definitely a piece that is set in 1968, unlike the plays that are not set in times or eras," he said. "Like the play "Rabbit Hole" you could set in 2004 or you could set it in 1984. That situation is going to remain more or less the same. … But with Mart's play I think that in the end what's really making it a classic is that it definitely is a time capsule for that particular year, as well as a classic in the sense that the issue of human nature and relationships that it's exploring are, no matter what, timeless in their essence.
"In this play we are going to focus on the minutiae and the layers of the relationships between these men. The cultural and political issues that the play touches on come out naturally. But I plan to just really focus on these friendships because I think that is ultimately what is holding the play up on a very human level."
Having Crowley as a consultant has deepened Cummings' understanding of the work. The most trenchant observation by the playwright, he said, was a description of the lead character Michael, thereby unlocking the play's meaning for Cumming. "Michael is a collection of all the references of movies he has consumed in a lifetime. At the end of the play he realizes that nothing is there, and if nothing is there how do you start to build yourself up again?"
The mission of Transport Group, Cummings said, is to move "actors outside of their comfort zones." Apparently, he wants the same unsettling feeling for his audience. Rather than stage Boys in a conventional proscenium theater, Cummings has sought out a raw space in Midtown for the production. Audience members will be seated in chairs that closely ring the sturm and drang of the central action.
"When you come to see the show as an audience member, you'll be seated all in and around the apartment space," he explained. "It's not like one neat square or circle. The idea is that we're basically trying to create Michael's apartment, albeit theatrically. What we're after is to create an experience where people feel as if they are flies on the wall in Michael's apartment on this one particular night." Cummings calls his conceit an environmentally based stage.
When first told of the configuration of the audience seating, playwright Mart Crowley was worried, telling Cummings, "This is going to look like an AA meeting." The director had a quick response: "So what? It is!"
Cummings also decided to combine both acts the play, which pleased the playwright.
"We're going to do it in one piece; it's not going to have an intermission," Crowley said. "It's going to go right straight through. I think that's going to solve a lot of the problems of Act I being the laughs and Act II being the dark side. You'll never know when Act I and Act II blend. It will be trimmed, nut not rewritten—just cut to get rid of a lot of the flab that audiences don't have the attention span to be subjected to any longer."
Casting was not difficult, Cummings said. The number of enthusiastic actors vying for roles for this production was far more than what he received for his previous 12 productions. However, the subsequent auditions indicated that some people had wildly divergent understandings of the play.
"Usually actors who came in for auditions, I could tell either didn't understand the play, weren't familiar with it or hadn't read it," he said. " [ They were acting ] from cursory impressions or what they had heard. The uninformed people [ think that all the characters ] are campy and self-loathing. I've always been bewildered by that because to me that's not true, if one actually reads the play." Not that Cummings dismisses self-loathing as a character trait.
"There were plenty of characters in August: Osage County who were self-loathing."
Some detractors claim The Boys in the Band is a black eye for modern gay politics. Cummings dismisses the notion heatedly. "It's theatre. It's drama. You can't have a diorama of presidential saints. These particular nine people, I don't think [ Crowley's ] saying they stand in for every gay person in the world."
Transport Group presents a revival of The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley, directed by Jack Cummings III. It's at 37 W. 26th, 12th Floor, New York City. The production runs through March 14. Tickets are $10-$45; the theatre is not wheelchair-accessible. Tickets are online at www.transportgroup.org; also, call 866-811-4111.
