Gays on Broadway

Theater critic Mordden (Pick a Pocket or Two) gallops through a century of gay American theater in this uneven history. Surveying 1910 to 2010, Mordden spotlights the “plays and the people” that brought queer culture to the American stage, including productions with gay characters, those written by gay creatives, or those “whose sense of parody or outright camp... are at least gay-adjacent.” Mordden traces historical themes, including an uptick in sympathetic portrayals of gay men leaving their wives in the 1960s, and the “problem plays” of the ’90s and aughts in which gayness served as a “social controversy that the principals discuss.” Mordden is most successful with close analysis, as in his consideration of the 1968 The Boys in the Band (“wildly funny... and a tiny bit unbelievable, yet so reflective of what gay life was like in New York in 1968 that the show is almost a documentary”). But his semi-stream-of-consciousness style and catty tone too often distract—he describes Truman Capote as possessing the “attitude of a malicious petit four” and pedantically corrects popular pronunciations of Madame Butterfly—and while Stonewall is referenced, the history is largely isolated from broader trends in culture and media. Queer theater fans will be piqued, though Mordden’s style is a love-it or leave-it proposition. (June)