Thursday, June 25, 2020

181, FOUR FRIENDS. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

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.