Eli Nguyen
The Mart from the Michael:
THR 352
A Speculative Biography of Playwright Mart Crowley
The facts are simple enough: Mart Crowley was a gay American playwright born in
Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1935.1 After graduating from Catholic University of America in
1957, Crowley spent the early stages of his career bumping shoulders with figures such as
Elia Kazan, William Inge and perhaps most notably actress Natalie Wood, who would
eventually connect him with an agent to begin getting his own writing published.2
Influenced by other big names such as Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams that he was
exposed to during this time, Crowley would write his debut play The Boys In The Band in
1968 in response to a 1966 essay published by critic Stanley Kaufmann saying that gay
writers failed to write convincing heterosexual characters and should stick to writing about
their own experiences. Despite the scathing subtext that plays written about homosexual
experiences would not be successful or lucrative given the closeted nature of queer
representation at the time, The Boys In The Band was a runaway success, with a film deal
and 1001 performances to its name only three years after publication.
What is less simple is the effect this impulse for autobiographical writing had on
Crowley’s body of work. The motivation for writing The Boys in the Band was explicitly to
give an honest portrayal of gay experiences on stage, and Crowley is quite open in admitting
that the characters in the play are based heavily on people in his own life and their
experiences – as well as his own. The main character, (“Lead? Protagonist? Antagonist?
Resident hobgoblin?”)3 Michael Connelly is a not-so-subtle self-insert character, a fact which
in and of itself is not an issue by any means; the assignment was to write from his own
experiences, and so he did.
The rest of Mart Crowley’s works are fictionalized versions of events from his own
life, and despite the non-serialized nature of live theater, his character Michael Connelly
would appear in 4 of his 6 published plays. A Breeze from the Gulf (1973) is an exploration
of the adolescent Michael’s troubled relationship with his parents, both of whom are
struggling with substance abuse. Remote Asylum (1970) sees Michael’s character take
something of a back seat on a vacation with two friends forced to confront their failing
relationship, and most famously, The Boys in the Band (1968) exposes the catty and cruel
1
"Mart Crowley, Mississippi Writer, Producer and Playwright from Vicksburg," Mississippi Writers, Musicians,
Actors, and Artists, accessed May 13, 2025, https://www.mswritersandmusicians.com/mississippi-writers/martcrowley
2
KPFA Radio, "Playwright Interview: Mart Crowley (1935-2020)" YouTube, September 17, 2024,
https://youtu.be/Mxv5iruQu2s?si=PVxlwF6exJsKZ6tr.
3
Tony Kushner, "Introduction," in The Boys In the Band - Samuel French Acting Edition (Samuel French, 2018), 10.
Eli Nguyen
The Mart from the Michael:
THR 352
A Speculative Biography of Playwright Mart Crowley
nature of gay male friendships, with Michael featured as the instigator to the emotional
turmoil depicted. These tumultuous relationships are revisited in The Men From The Boys
(2002), after the characters, alongside Mart, have aged 30 years.
It's common for writers to either intentionally or incidentally write themselves into
their work. What I find interesting is Crowley’s continual insistence on writing Michael into
his plays. The Boys in the Band achieved significant notoriety, but the odds of someone
being familiar with Michael as a character prior to sitting down in the theater decreases
with every reappearance of Michael in
each successive work. His continual presence in Crowley’s writing isn’t for the benefit of
audiences – it’s a choice made by Mart, for Mart.
Which begs the question: why? If the vast, vast majority of audiences are only
experiencing this character in isolation, within the context of individual plays, why is
Michael still there? Other than Michael, these plays have no other overt connection or
intertextuality, which leads me to believe that to Mart, Michael became something of a
crutch. It’s certainly easier to start a new story if you have a main character that you don’t
have to rebuild from scratch each time – complicated somewhat by the fact that Michael is,
rather explicitly, a fictionalized version of Mart Crowley himself. His portrayal of Michael,
and the way that it evolves throughout his plays, can be used to paint a fascinating portrait
of Crowley as an author.
It would seem that the most damning evidence would be
found by looking for exaggerations or discrepancies in the
characterization of Michael as compared to Mart – but what has
emerged in researching the life of Mart Crowley is a startlingly
honest similarity between the two.
RICHARD: But there's also your
character who pops up in several of
your plays - obviously three plays
at least: the Boys in The Band, A
Breeze From the Gulf and now The
Men From The Boys - Michael
In The Boys In The Band, we are introduced to Michael as
a semi-closeted, semi-Catholic struggling writer whose social
MART: You know his initials are
network is composed of variously visible queer men are all too
M C, he's Michael Connelly, I'm
familiar with his vices – alcohol, and being a cunt. He lives
Mart Crowley, so you know, not
beyond his means, avoids debt collectors and cares an awful lot
too hard to figure out
about the precise effect created by the particular sweater he’s
wearing at a given moment. (Many such cases.) A Breeze from
the Gulf corroborates these traits, providing context for the
Catholic guilt and family history of substance abuse. We learn that Michael’s academic
career lines up 1:1 with Crowley’s. There’s a line alluding to Michael going to ‘a Catholic
University’ – in real life Crowley graduated from Catholic University of America, and we
learn in The Boys in the Band that Michael is a Georgetown graduate, which is a minor, but
funny embellishment. Both leave Washington for New York to follow their dreams of being
a writer, and are occasionally summoned back south by the failing health of their parents.
Remote Asylum follows Michael in one of the dissatisfying Mediterranean excursions he
alludes to in the beginning of Boys.
Eli Nguyen
The Mart from the Michael:
THR 352
A Speculative Biography of Playwright Mart Crowley
The Men from The Boys is perhaps the most revealing of Mart’s own character. In an
interview given shortly after the premiere of The Men from The Boys with KPFA Radio,
Crowley discusses at length the extent to which scenes from The Men were directly inspired
by his own experiences interacting with younger gay men through rehab programs and
most notably, an argument he had with a close friend about not being honest about his HIV
status.4 While this interview establishes just how autobiographical Crowley’s writing truly
is, it also reveals that his writing process contains some significant flaws.
While speaking on his process for writing The Men, Crowley reveals that he doesn’t plan a
structure or make notes about narrative beats before writing his plays he “just wrote it
from beginning to end”. This is painfully obvious, having now read almost all of his plays.
The rest of the interview feels to me like the interviewer, Richard Wolinsky, fishing for Mart
to admit that The Men desperately needed to go through further rounds of editing. He
remains incredibly professional, but having read The Men, I have to agree with him. To say it
lacks structure would be an understatement. There’s nothing wrong with ‘conversational’
works, but it’s a play that has too many aspirations of portraying heavy topics for it to
meander the way that it does. I know that I’m speaking from a place of ignorance in making
this condemnation as I am not a professional writer by any means. Clearly it worked for
him, at least in some capacity.
For better or worse, Crowley didn’t write another play after the Men from the Boys.
I’m sure there were innumerable personal and professional factors as to why this was the
end of the line, but I get the impression that there weren’t any more plays because Michael
had reached the end of his line. If I’m being charitable, Michael was clearly some sort of
muse for Mart Crowley’s writing, but the ending of The Men leaves us with an aging, lost,
and grieving Michael. There is still more life for him to live, just as Mart lived for another
almost 20 years after writing The Men – but whatever came next couldn’t live up to the
bottled lightning that was The Boys in the Band.
If I’m being uncharitable, Crowley struck gold with his first play, and it cursed him
for the rest of his career. His early success is certainly worth celebrating, as it came at a
pivotal time in American queer history, and helped inspire previously whispered
conversations about gay visibility to become political demands for the movement. But the
legacy of The Boys in the Band haunts the rest of his work. Crowley went above and beyond
in addressing Kauffmann’s criticism of gay writers, drawing from a potent personal well of
complicated queer experiences to render an electric and nuanced portrayal of gay men at
the time. This success allowed Crowley to continue to use Michael as a crutch in the rest of
his writing, and because he found this success in pulling directly from his own experiences,
it seems to me that Crowley never got the hang of writing fiction: he just got good at
fictionalizing his reality.
4
KPFA Radio, "Playwright Interview: Mart Crowley (1935-2020)"
Eli Nguyen
The Mart from the Michael:
THR 352
A Speculative Biography of Playwright Mart Crowley
Bibliography:
o Barnes, Clive. "The Theater: Mart Crowley's 'A Breeze From the Gulf' Opens." The
New York Times, October 16, 1973, 53.
o CBS Sunday Morning. ""The Boys in the Band" Playwright Mart Crowley." YouTube.
May 6, 2018. https://youtu.be/HoHSYcBS2Ls?si=q8yiZDVoNHw7zpqH.
o KPFA Radio. "Playwright Interview: Mart Crowley (1935-2020)." YouTube.
September 17, 2024. https://youtu.be/Mxv5iruQu2s?si=PVxlwF6exJsKZ6tr.
o Kushner, Tony. "Introduction." In The Boys In the Band - Samuel French Acting
Edition, 7-16. Samuel French, 2018.
o "Mart Crowley, Mississippi Writer, Producer and Playwright from Vicksburg."
Mississippi Writers, Musicians, Actors, and Artists. Accessed May 13, 2025.
https://www.mswritersandmusicians.com/mississippi-writers/mart-crowley.
o Portwood, Jerry. "Mart Crowley, Groundbreaking 'The Boys in the Band' Playwright,
Dead at 84." Rolling Stone. Last modified March 9, 2020.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/playwright-mart-crowleyboys-in-the-band-dead-84-964742/.
o
Spoto, Donald. "Super Mart: 3 Plays by Mart Crowley." the Advocate, Jun 11, 1996, 55-56,
http://mutex.gmu.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/magazines/supermart/docview/2103579993/se-2.
o "Tony Nominated Scribe Mart Crowley on The Boys in the Band's Newfound
Acceptance & More." Broadway.com. June 4, 2019.
https://www.broadway.com/buzz/196061/tony-nominated-scribe-mart-crowleyon-the-boys-in-the-bands-newfound-acceptance-more/.