At the recent off-Broadway revival of The Boys in the Band, the audience–which included twentysomethings and men who might have been twentysomething in 1968, when this gay bitch-fest premiered–observed the tortured drama as if it were a natural history museum's dinosaur exhibit. In a way, it was. Theater can be a record of our past, and boy, did the unliberated characters, viciously bulldozing one another's hopes of happiness even as they gathered for a birthday party, seem like the past. But they weren't alone. In a season brimming with well-told stories of gay life, evening after evening brought evidence of the disaster of the closet, whether in the army in the 1940s (the heartfelt musical Yank!), at the inception of the gay-rights movement in the 1950s (The Temperamentals), in repressive 1958 London (The Pride), in a fantasy Riviera of the 1970s (La Cage aux Folles), or even in a strangely unliberated Manhattan present (Next Fall). What's weird is that all these productions were happening at a time when the closet is basically a teardown. Of course, gay success at integration, however incomplete, is what made the profusion possible; even straight people headed to The Pride (which featured riveting performances from Hugh Dancy and Ben Whishaw) and Next Fall (which complicated its can't-come-out-to-the-parents theme with battles over religious faith). The deeper question is why social advancement has led to backward-looking theater, reminiscent of sentimental (if stirring) Jewish and black plays of earlier decades. Perhaps the answer is simply that theater is about conflict, and where's the conflict in gay people being happy? Political success has not been good to stories forged in the crucible of their authors' difficult youths. The best of the recent crop were therefore those, like the adoption musical The Kid, that looked for drama not in what led to liberation but in what comes next. Or that dared, like The Pride, which jumps to a present haunted by AIDS, drugs, and sex addiction, to ask, At what price?
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