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| Jennifer Warren, Keir Dullea. |
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| Keir Dullea, Tony Musante. |
This addition to the gay sweepstakes so evident in 1970s
theatre pictured a Greenwich Village flat one snowy New Year’s Eve. The tenant,
Jimmy (Keir Dullea), an actor in his late 30s with a troubled career and an
equally disturbed relationship with his girlfriend, Kate (Jenny Warren), arrives home
to discover a burglar. The thief, Vito (Tony Musante), is overpowered by Jimmy
and tied face down over the kitchen sink where, to allow him to urinate, his
pants are soon removed, exposing his rear end.
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| Bill Moor, Anthony Ponzini, Mary Hammil., At first, both men seem conventionally straight.
However, the wily Vito soon tries to seduce his determinedly hetero captor into
having sex. The play turns from a rather funny comedy of sadomasochistic
repartee into a pro-gay propaganda tract. The continued objections from Jimmy
gradually subside as it appears that a bond of affection has begun to tie the
men together. Vito ends up staying the night, albeit in a separate bed. |
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| Jennifer Warren, Peter White, Tony Musante, Keir Dullea. |
The play was viewed by John Simon
as an “ultradishonest” work trying unsuccessfully to hide its nature as a “homosexual
wish-fulfillment” fantasy. The plot’s implausibility was a major sore point
with him and others, as was the author’s clearly anti-feminine bias, brought
out in the characterizations of the play’s two women. A few critics chuckled at
the many bitchy, gay-oriented laugh lines, but too many others were “painfully
blunt and obvious," as Douglas Watt put it. Watt also jibed at the poorly
defined roles of Jimmy and Vito.
The performances, direction, and
setting were acceptably slick, but the play had no staying power and was gone
in two weeks. It was revived in 1978, however, for an Off-Broadway run of 301
performances. Regardless, playwright James Kirkwood had little to worry about
financially by then. A little show whose book he co-wrote with Nicholas
Dante, which had opened Off Broadway just as P.S. Your Cat is Dead was getting off the ground, had moved to Broadway
soon after. Its title was A Chorus Line and it would break box-office records for years.
