At the end of the documentary included in the new The Boys in the Band DVD, there’s an “In Memoriam” montage, commemorating six actors: Frederick Combs (Donald; 1935-1992), Leonard Frey (Harold; 1938-1988), Cliff Gorman (Emory; 1926-1992), Robert LaTourneaux (Cowboy; 1942-86), Kenneth Nelson (Michael; 1930-1993), and Keith Prentice (Larry; 1940-1992).

That means that Reuben Greene (Bernard), Laurence Luckinbill (Hank), and Peter White (Alan) are still alive - as well as the man who started it all: Mart Crowley, who in the late ‘60s dared to write a play about the love that dared not speak its name, and dared to write it in a most outspoken fashion. No play had even displayed men kissing, dancing – and telling such truths about themselves – while a straight man is shocked to find that his supposedly straight friend is gay, and has plenty of gay friends.

Crowley recalls showing the first pages to the friends on whom he loosely based Donald and Harold. “Douglas Murray - Donald – used to drive up from Laguna to L.A. to see his analyst on Saturday nights, and then would come by my place,” he says, “so the play began with art imitating life, with Donald’s instead coming from Long Island to his analyst to Michael’s place in Manhattan. Douglas would read and criticize, with a lot of ‘I’d never say thats.’ Howard Jeffrey - Harold - didn’t read it, for he was as mysterious as Harold. All he said was, ‘Someday I will tell you what I think.’ But he never did.”

Luckinbill and White portrayed the only characters in the play who’d had sustained heterosexual lives – and yet both originally wanted to play characters more involved in gay life. “I wanted Michael,” says Luckinbill, “and when that wasn’t going to happen, I asked for Larry. (Director) Robert Moore and Mart told me I wasn’t right for that, either, and that they wanted me for Hank.” That decision impacted White, who wanted Hank, but was told he’d be Alan. Says Luckinbill, “It took me a while to appreciate that Hank has a speech that really nails the plot – and that my career would change for the better from having played it.”

Luckinbill’s agent would have never predicted it. “Ironically, she also represented the play itself – and yet she said, ‘Don’t do it. It’ll kill your career.’ I was depressed by what she said, but I went back to my apartment and told my wife Robin, ‘It’s damn good. I’m going to do it.’ Mart was thrilled that I defied my agent.”

Says White, “Though I know a lot of the guys were told they’d never work again, that wasn’t put on me quite as much, because I had the safe role. I heard that one agent vowed she’d never handle anyone who did this play, and that was hard to hear – but Myrna Loy, who I knew at the time, convinced me to do it.”

Did their fellow actors who played gays make them feel like outcasts? After all, many actors who played the Chorus Line characters who weren’t chosen by Zach often said that at the end of the night, they felt as if they themselves, not the characters, had been rejected.

“Yes,” admits Luckinbill. “Hank is made to feel as if he’s so square that I occasionally felt left out. It was done in a harmless way, and wasn’t malicious.” He adds something else: “Because I’d been in the theater 11 years by that point, I though I’d seen pretty much everything, but the gays in the cast opened my eyes to other worlds -- like the Ansonia baths.”

White says, “Yes, I felt that way, too – but mostly because a lot of the cast already knew each other and I didn’t know anyone. I was in awe of Kenneth Nelson because I knew about all he’d done, and I’d seen Frederick Combs do A Taste of Honey in New Haven. I was the one who hadn’t done much, so that made me feel left out. You always hear about Jerome Robbins splitting the Sharks and the Jets in West Side Story, not allowing them to fraternize during rehearsals, and it rather felt like that to me for the first two weeks. Then Fred Combs asked me to join everyone at lunch, and I felt much better.”

Only for a while. “When we did the first workshop,” White recalls, “I got booed at the end. I thought it was my performance, but it was explained to me that the predominantly gay audience was booing the character.”

Luckinbill recalls, “We opened at the Vandam, that little dump, and the next morning I was passing by and saw a bunch of people crowding around. I asked someone, ‘Was there an accident?’ and was told, ‘No, it’s a line for people wanting to get tickets to a play.’ It went all the way to Houston Street, and that’s when I first thought I might be in a huge hit.”

He was - but would he be in the movie? “Mart got a telegram from Ray Stark, who offered $250,000 for the rights,” he recalls. “The only stipulation was that all of us would be replaced by Hollywood stars. Mart said, ‘No, it’s got to be with the entire original cast, or we won’t make a movie.’ Meanwhile, we all expected him to give in, so it became a favorite game of ours to joke backstage about who’d get our parts: Rock Hudson for Michael, Roddy McDowall for Emory, Randolph Scott for Cowboy -- in other words, all the actors we knew were closeted.

“But Mart had the courage of a lion. Soon he decided to produce it with us. Now this was in the days when there was really no such thing as an independent movie. What Mart did have to compromise on, though, was having Robert Moore as our director.”

“The studio wanted someone who’d done a movie,” Crowley explains. “They’d given into so many of my requests - my producing, doing the screenplay, and the original cast - I felt I had to give in on something. But I didn’t have a clue on who’d be a good director. Then, in what turned out to be a coincidence, I went to see the movie version of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party. I was riveted by the direction, which was all kept to this confined space, just like in my play, so I thought anybody who can give such variety and invention to such a claustrophobic atmosphere is a man I’ve got to talk to. His name - William Friedkin- didn’t mean a thing to me, but when I mentioned him to my executive producer Dominick Dunne -- yes, THAT Dominick Dunne – he said, ‘Oh, I know Bill, and you ought to know him, too - you were both working at Four Star (a Hollywood studio), when you were writing that pilot for Bette Davis and he was directing the Smothers Brothers.’ Well, I didn’t know him, because I never spent much time watching the other shows being filmed, though I did often check out Barbara Stanwyck’s Big Valley.” He stops to think how that sounds, laughs, and adds, “Can you imagine with Emory could do with that line?” he says, citing the play's most effeminate character.

Luckinbill says that even with a new director, the performances in the film are precisely the ones the actors gave on stage. “We’d been doing it for two years, so we knew all the motivations,” he notes. “The one thing I miss in the film is that you can’t see eight reactions to every joke as you would on stage. What Friedkin had to do was cut to the person who was best reacting to that joke.”

So is Alan indeed a closeted gay, as Michael insists? Says White, “Mart told me, ‘You’ve got to decide that yourself -- and you must promise not to tell me. I don’t ever want to know. If you can get half the audience to think he is and half to think he isn’t, you’ve done a really great job.’ Well, I’m one of those actors who creates a tremendous backstory for any character I play, so I did make a decision for myself - but I won’t tell you what it is.”

But what of Alan’s saying that Hank is “an attractive fellow”? White laughs and says, “I was born and raised on the East coast, where I recall my sister, brother, and my parents calling the other gender as ‘attractive.’ That was generic then, so wasn’t it smart of Mart to choose an adjective that leaves the door open for interpretation?”

While Luckinbill doubted that he’d be in the film, White was all but certain he wouldn’t be. “I’d been hearing they’d get a very famous actor, and a wonderful one at that. But he would have been totally wrong. He was gay, too, which is one of the reasons why I won’t tell you who he is now.”

Full of secrets, aren’t you, Mr. White? That’s fine; we understand. But there is one thing that White and Luckinbill would each tell if they only knew the answer: Where is Reuben Greene, who played Bernard, “the African Queen”?

“He’s completely unavailable,” says Luckinbill. Adds White, “Reuben is a mystery. He got involved with a lady, and fathered a son who’s now a doctor in New York, but the son either doesn’t know or won’t tell us where his father is. We heard Reuben got very religious and even entered a monastery, but we can’t say for sure.” Sums up Luckinbill, “I just hope that he feels about The Boys in the Band the way we do - something of which we can be very proud.”

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com