A gay time on Broadway

Whatever its faults, New York theatre has virtually patented a new form: the gay comedy of manners. Its origins lie in Mart Crowley's 1968 play, The Boys in the Band, dealing with a hetero visitor to a gay birthday bash. New York's gay boulevard comedies are attracting a broad audience, writes Michael Billington

Crowley's work launched a series of plays that combined a gay agenda with mass audience appeal. There is now clearly a big market for gay boulevard comedy. Of two examples on show in New York, Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed, at Broadway's Cort Theatre, is by far the more successful. It is based on a perfectly plausible premise: that a manic Hollywood agent would go to any lengths to prevent her star client coming out of the closet. Behind the ingeniously structured jokes, Beane is making a serious point: that America, at heart, remains a conservative culture and that even when Hollywood tackles gay relationships, as in Brokeback Mountain, it takes care to publicise the fact that the stars themselves are straight as a die.

Beane's central target is Hollywood hypocrisy. The high-powered agent, Diane, says of herself and her client, Mitchell: "I'm a lesbian. He's a fag. We're in show business. We're the perfect couple." But the art lies in concealment and Diane is appalled when Mitchell falls in love with a rent boy. Matters are complicated when she, trying to transfer a New York gay play to the big screen, needs to advertise his straight credentials if he is to play the lead.

What is impressive is the number of targets Beane hits - not just Hollywood's sexual double standards but the power of tyrannical agent/producers, the film culture's contempt for theatre and its historical disdain for wordsmiths. "A writer with the final cut?" shrieks Diane at one point. "I'd rather give firearms to small children."

Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only is an even more interesting phenomenon: a play that seemingly endorses gay marriage to the middle-of-the-road audience at the classy Manhattan Theatre Club. Rudnick is an intriguing dramatist: 15 years ago he wrote a comedy about Aids called Jeffrey, which Frank Rich, the New York Times critic, recommended as the best play in town. His new play, however, strikes me as a muddle in which plot and character are subservient to gags. Imagine High Society with gay politics. In an upper-crust New York home, as the daughter of the McCullough family is about to get married, the lawyer-patriarch is summoned by President Bush to advise on a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. This confounds the McCulloughs' best friend, a world-famous dress designer, Hank Hadley, whose lifelong male partner has recently died. Hank's love of the family conflicts with his sexual liberalism.

If Hank is confused, I was utterly bewildered. On one level, the play satirises gay marriage. Hank sends up the absurdities of male marital vows in which people swear: "I will build a man-house for my man-spouse." And at one point, the socialite Mrs McCullough quips of same-sex marriage: "If that's what gay people want, let 'em learn." But, while keeping his tongue in his cheek, Rudnick also places his hand on his heart. On the eve of the daughter's wedding, Hank organises a gay strike that nearly closes down the New York theatre and garment industries. Improbably, Hank turns from satirist to propagandist, asking: "If we can't get married, why should you?"

But Rudnick's love of a good gag overcomes narrative coherence. In trying to please gay and straight audiences simultaneously, he ends up, unlike Beane, satisfying neither.

It is intriguing, however, to see New York's willingness to combine sexually explicit themes with traditional boulevard forms - a product, I suspect, of a predominantly gay theatrical culture and a continuing love of screwball comedy and social satire. Britain has all but banished farce and drawing-room comedy, and largely confines gay theatre to a specialist ghetto. There are signs that the tide is beginning to turn: Samuel Adamson's Southwark Fair and Mark Ravenhill's Mother Clap's Molly House were both (UK) National Theatre successes. But, if we have anything to learn from New York, it is that gay themes can achieve mass appeal when laced with laughter.

- Guardian Service