Band Leader

It almost seems inevitable that Jack Cummings III would direct Mart Crowley’s landmark gay drama The Boys in the Band, which is being presented by his award-winning company Transport Group, starting on February 12. Cummings, the Transport Group’s artistic director, once worked as an assistant to the late writer Dominick Dunne, who was executive producer of the film version of The Boys in the Band back in 1970 and who was close friends with Crowley. One day, Dunne told his assistant, “You should do The Boys in the Band” and made the introduction to the playwright.

In 2008, Cummings received a call from his friend Buddy Thomas — who happens to be Crowley’s agent -= asking him to direct a 40th anniversary production of the show. He went on to stage a star-studded reading of the play that summer, and shortly afterwards began discussions with Crowley about how to develop the work for a new generation of theatergoers.

Rather than stage the work in a conventional proscenium theater, Cummings chose a raw space on West 26th Street to accommodate a site-specific staging. “When you come to see the show as an audience member, you’ll be seated all in and around the apartment space,” he says. “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.” When Crowley was first told of the configuration of the audience seating, he told Cummings, “This is going to look like an AA meeting.” The director had a quick response: “So what? It is!”

Casting the production — which 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 — was a challenge, says Cummings.

“Usually actors who came in for auditions, I could tell they didn’t understand the play, weren’t familiar with it or hadn’t read it,” says Cummings. “They were acting from cursory impressions or what they had heard. Those 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.”

Indeed, some detractors claim The Boys in the Band is a black eye for modern gay politics. But Cummings dismisses the notion heatedly. “It’s theater; it’s drama,” he notes. “You can’t have a diorama of presidential saints. These particular nine people don’t stand in for every gay person in the world.”

Cummings, who is married to actress Barbara Walsh, was a toddler when the original play was produced, but he understands the importance of the setting. “It’s definitely a piece that is set in 1968, unlike the plays that are not set in times or eras,” he says. “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 issues of human nature and relationships that it’s exploring are timeless in their essence. So we are going to focus on the minutiae and the layers of the relationships and friendships between these men. I think that is ultimately what is holding the play up on a very human level.”