Bending the arc of theatrical liberation
Thinking about The Boys in the Band, Broadway, and Chicago Last weekend, I watched Ryan Murphy's Netflix production of The Boys in the Band, adapted from Mart Crowley's groundbreaking 1968 off-Broadway play about a group of gay male friends at a birthday party who confront each other over drinks and struggle with the (pre-Stonewall) internalized hatred of living in a deeply homophobic soc…