Mart Crowley is known primarily for his landmark play dealing with male homosexual life-styles, The Boys in the Band. From virtually every critical quarter, this play's author was acclaimed as a master composer of economical, pungent, and bitingly humorous dialogue. However, controversy raged. To many critics and viewers, the more significant contribution lay in the play's honest treatment of a topic which, up to the time of this production in 1968, had never received a fully satisfactory rendering on the stage. Others viewed the work as a distorted picture of a group of homosexual men, self-deprecating, pessimistic, and trivial, and as such, harmful to the cause of gay rights. A third group, pleased with the choice of subject matter, expressed a negative reaction toward the treatment of that subject. Gay activist and writer Donn Teal can be seen as a spokesman for this group. Teal writes: "though it was...