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| Cast of Four Friends. |
FOUR
FRIENDS [Drama/Friendship/Homosexuality/Marriage] A: Larry
Kramer; D: Alfred Gingold; S/L: Duane Mazey; C: Tom Pallon; P: Michael Harvey;
T: Theatre de Lys (OB); 2/17/75 (1)
Playwright Larry Kramer was a respected screenwriter
and had won a Ford Foundation prize for Four Friends work when it was done in workshop,
but those credentials were no shield against the sharpened quills of the
critics in the days before he became a leading advocate of gay rights. Some
expert dialogue saved the play from being a complete artistic loss—it was, with
one performance, a complete financial loss—but its quality lines were, said
Clive Barnes, “rather like cloves being stuck into ham.” Otherwise, the play
was “silly” to Christopher Sharp and “wrongheaded” to Douglas Watt.
It was about four men in their mid-30s, very close
friends since their college days at Yale. Charlie (Robert Stattel) is a
successful banker suffering from impotence and catatonia brought on by the
discovery of his English wife’s (Sharon Loughlin) infidelity. Ben (John
Colenback) is a successful ad executive, a homosexual in love with Mike (Brad
Davis). Edward (Jeremiah Sullivan) is an unemployed fellow from a moneyed
family who happens to be a sadomasochist. And Dick (Ronald Hale) is doing well
as a psychologist, but is unhappily married for the second time.
The play describes the crumbling of the friendship
among these Four Musketeers, as they call themselves, with subplots involving each
of them. Four apartments are among the locales in which the action is set.
Dully directed and weakly acted—Barnes called the
acting “atrocious”—Four Friends had
barely any friends among the reviewers. Martin Gottfried, however, sensed in it
“a balance between humor and seriousness, the nerve to be sincere, and, most of
all, craftsmanship.” Still, he acknowledged, Kramer’s “soap-opera plotting” did
it in.
