Christ Almighty someone’s decided to breath life back into Staircase…

Review: ‘Staircase’ revival – ‘Honeymooners’ in gay ’60s London

Charles and Harry could be many a bickering, thoroughly co-dependent couple who’ve been together for two decades, but life wasn’t that simple for gay men in the London of the ’60s. That’s what adds some dramatic meat and bite to Charles Dyer’s "Staircase," the otherwise schematic if waspish 1966 comedy that opened Saturday at Theatre Rhinoceros. The darker notes that creep into the last scene humanize the camp, bitchy-hairdressers couple and add depth to a fitfully funny show.

"Staircase" is of historical interest in any case. A late replacement for Mart Crowley’s unavailable "The Boys in the Band" in Artistic Director John Fisher’s 30th anniversary season, "Staircase" actually predates "Boys" (by a few months) as the first openly gay play on Broadway in the modern era. A hit in London (with Paul Scofield and Patrick Magee) in ’66, and a flop in New York (with Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea) in ’67, it also bombed as a movie, starring Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, in ’69. In every case, the publicity stressed the heterosexual credentials of everyone involved.

If there was any doubt as to the heterosexual credentials of the makers of that film, watching it should have decisively hammered them to the floor.  That rank piece of trash is even more offensive then Boys In The Band in the cheapshit stereotypes it trades in.  It doesn’t need a fucking revival, it needs to be buried in the same grave as the blackface minstrel shows.

For two hours they moan and piss about their sad, wasted lives, never showing a sign of love or affection.  We are meant to feel sorry for them, but after all their time together there is no sign of an emotional attachment between them, no indication of a commitment to the relationship.  When they do cling to one another, it is in loneliness and desperation, emotions that have been used to characterize homosexual relationships in film and literature for a century.  Throughout the film Charlie and Harry repeat how much happier they would have been if only nature had not played them such a dirty trick…

-Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet

Staircase mocks its aging gay characters, and invites the audience to join in.  In that, Staircase was eminently typical of the films of its day that pretended to shine a light on the sordid homosexual underworld, and were in reality nothing more then freak shows.  Played for shock value, and sporting a thin veneer of pity, straight audiences were supposed to come away from the experience happily horrified, and relieved that they weren’t like those poor twisted queers. 

There’s a great movie to be made someday about the lives of older gay people back before Stonewall.  It could have pathos, it could have comedy, it could be full of the human struggle of people living in an age when gay folk could only see monsters reflected back at them by the popular culture surrounding them…an age when most gay people themselves believed that they were sick in some deeply profound way.  Maybe someday someone will do that story.

[Edited to add the Vito Russo quote, and some additional verbiage of my own]