The Road to ‘Bent’

Very occasionally a play has a significance beyond the confines of the theater. Beaumarchais’s Le Mariage de Figaro (1778) sounded the death knell of the feudal droit du seigneur. Le Roi s’amuse (1832), Victor Hugo’s savage exposé of Louis Philippe’s corrupt monarchy, was banned after a single performance. Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) devastatingly dramatized the corrosive legacy of the paternalistic past in the form of inherited venereal disease and illegitimate offspring. Eugène Brieux’s Les Avariés (1901) went a shocking step further, depicting in forensic detail the syphilis pandemic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1953 Arthur Miller’s The Crucible mirrored the ongoing witch hunt of the House Un-American Activities Committee; three years later John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger gave voice to the frustration and rage of the postwar generation in Britain.

Martin Sherman’s play Bent (1979), an excoriating account of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals that is also a story of love between two men in the most terrible circumstances, belongs to this select category. So, arguably, does his earlier, less sensational but equally radical Passing By (1974), charting the beginning, middle, and end of an ordinary love affair between two unremarkable young men. When writing these plays, Sherman spoke with the voice of his tribe.

His memoir, On the Boardwalk, is, in effect, The Road to ‘Bent.’ It describes his long battle with many foes—his profoundly dysfunctional family, the no less dysfunctional American theater, and a potentially life-threatening genetic inheritance—and ends with his triumph on Broadway and London stages. The book belongs squarely to the genre of the theatrical memoir, whose greatest exemplar is Moss Hart’s Act One (1959). But its opening resembles nothing in Hart’s book or any other theatrical memoir known to me:

I was not an average queerboy. I looked like a survivor from Dachau. I was six-feet-tall. I weighed just 107 pounds. I had a face consumed by acne: there were oozing sores surrounding my oversized nose, and my protruding teeth hung like an umbrella over my lower lip. It was 1960 and I was twenty-one. An adult at last. But probably not for long: it was generally assumed I would inherit a diabolical neurological disease that ravaged my family, and that within twenty years I would be a vegetable.

This unnerving beginning—titled, with due theatrical flourish, “Prologue”—establishes the direct address that characterizes the author’s voice throughout:

The disease was Huntington’s. In those days it was officially termed Huntington’s chorea and relatively little was known about it. What they did know is that it was inherited and that the earliest symptoms were often subtle problems with mood. Followed by a general lack of co-ordination, an unsteady gait and involuntary jerking movements. Followed by very understandable depression. Followed by complete physical and mental chaos, with speaking and thinking severely impaired.

“I am aware,” he says, “that this is no way to begin a memoir. But then neither is it a way to begin a life. Rest assured, it gets better. Although it takes a while.”

In these first pages, and for some hundred pages more, the book’s destination—Bent triumphant on Broadway—is unimaginably far away. The odds seem impossibly stacked against him. In their different ways, his Jewish American parents failed him badly. His mother, Julia, was ever more distant as she inexorably declined into Huntington’s, though she did do Sherman the priceless favor of introducing him to the theater, to which he became addicted from a very early age.

His father, Joe, on the other hand—a lawyer who passed the bar on his fifth attempt, and then only by the skin of his teeth—was theater. His approach to the law was simply to ignore it, preferring to generate indignant feelings among the jury by means of a torrent of incoherent rhetoric. “Do you believe these things called facts,” he would cry, “or do you believe this boy’s eyes? So what’s the truth? Sometimes the truth is a mystery. And with mystery, there is doubt. And if there’s doubt—a reasonable doubt, as the law says—you have to let this boy go.”

Now and then a judge would threaten him with contempt of court, to which he would reply:

“Because someone makes some rules and regulations, I’m not allowed to speak my mind?” At that point, the judge—if he had bravely held on to judicial principles up until then—would sigh, shake his head and throw in the towel.

It’s as if the Marx Brothers had a sixth sibling who was a crazed version of Atticus Finch. Sherman diagnoses him as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, a phenomenon, he notes, with which we have all become more familiar in recent years:

I always loved that courtroom story about Lawyer Sherman and would trot it out in lulls at dinner parties. When the forty-fifth president showed the same inability to countenance facts and details, I recognized that my father had built his profession around a symptom of an illness.

Sherman’s surroundings offered no escape. He grew up in Camden, New Jersey, “a city of almost no physical beauty…. I was desperate for Camden to be famous. I hated it being a backwater. I wanted it to be Paris.” Later it became famous for its crime rate: “Once it was officially dangerous, I was proud to have been raised there. So what if it wasn’t beautiful; you could finally die in Camden of something other than boredom.”

Annual holidays in Atlantic City, “a haven for the Jews who had escaped Eastern Europe and Germany and, in compensation, often became overweight,” brought him liberation from the frustrations of family life. On the boardwalk was an emporium that “featured a six-foot walking peanut with a huge peanut head who greeted you effusively…. You were on the other side of Alice’s mirror but the mirror was in Minsk.” He recalls a walk with his mother and her best friend, Betty,

past the Garden Pier, which housed the largest typewriter in the world (1,728 times the normal size) and featured huge billboards advertising vacuum cleaners…. I have spent the past eighty years wanting to know [what my mother and Betty were talking about]; I have convinced myself that if I remembered what they spoke about I would have the key to my mother; that she would no longer be a ghost, but a living and breathing, walking and talking human being…. But all I can remember is looking up at them as the world spun by and the clanging of shoes on the wooden planks.

“All I knew, subconsciously,” he says, “was that my mother had withdrawn…. Permanently.” She seems not to have talked to him much on their excursions to the theater or shared the experience with him in any palpable way, but she provided him with the conduit for his emotions and his imagination. He was deeply struck by various divas he saw on these trips, especially Carmen Miranda; he was overwhelmed when his mother spirited him to her dressing room, where she bestowed a kiss on him. He was equally drawn to Patricia Neal, sensing tragedy around her.

Something else was bubbling up within him, too: “The fact that I rushed to see any film that had a shirtless actor in it gave me no hints whatsoever of my sexual inclinations, since I was unaware that I had sexual inclinations.” He tells us, somewhat surprisingly, that he saw “many a Saturday matinee of plays that dealt (usually unhappily) with homosexuality and I had no problem intellectually understanding what they were about.” What plays might those have been? Tea and Sympathy (1953), when he was fifteen? Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), when he was seventeen and living away from home? But neither of those deals explicitly with homosexuality. It’s hard to think of a play or a film of the period—or before—that even acknowledged its existence. The Green Bay Tree (1933) by Mordaunt Shairp dealt with the relationship between an older man and his youthful protégé. It had only been revived once after its first run; even in 1933 Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times made a point of proclaiming that “there is nothing in the play to indicate that the relationship is more than passively degenerate.”

You need to go back to 1927 and Mae West’s The Drag, an absolutely fearless depiction of the pleasures and woes of young cross-dressers, to find a play that deals explicitly with homosexuality; police shut down performances of it in Connecticut and New Jersey, and it was never allowed to premiere in New York. It would be some time before the love that dare not speak its name was represented on an English-speaking stage, and rarely in a positive light.

Meanwhile Sherman was, thanks to his ongoing theatrical education, becoming more sophisticated. At thirteen he was already writing plays with unmistakable autobiographical undertones. In one, a teenager whose parents have died in a car crash is desperate to escape from his hometown; eventually he does. He wrote a radio series in which he himself appeared, the perfect medium for a boy cripplingly self-conscious about his appearance. Family life was becoming more insufferable. On an outing to Niagara Falls, Sherman brought along his 8mm camera, meaning to record the trip. At some point his father screamed at his mother. Suddenly realizing that he was on film, he switched on a phony smile, at which Sherman threw down the camera and screamed at his father, “because he was pretending that everything was alright when it clearly wasn’t and I hated the deception, although I had no idea how deep the deception went.”

He escaped by enrolling in the theater program at Boston University as an actor. His father approved, “not least because of the possibility that I only had another ten good years or so before the disease took hold.” Joe chose the moment when he took Martin to his dormitory to tell him for the first time about his mother’s Huntington’s, making it clear that there was every chance he might have inherited it.

Somehow he carried on with the theater program, though he knew he had no gift for acting. What he did have was a gift for friendship. In Boston and throughout his life, this shy, tormented misfit struck up extraordinary friendships with remarkable people who extended lifelines to him. Increasingly he was aware of feelings of intense desire, but he felt utterly, terminally undesirable. Instead he joined the drinking, smoking, snorting set, which gave him some temporary release. He also extended his range of reading: “I read Ibsen. I was moving from adolescence into pretension, and it was bliss. I thought then that these were the most perfect moments of my life. And I must admit they remain so.”

Love—and sex—remained elusive. He established a pattern, which he says lasted twenty years or so, “of manipulation by egocentric men, who didn’t mind fucking with me as long as they didn’t have to fuck me.” At least he had accepted that he was gay. Not that he was much concerned with sex: his mouth, as a result of the growth of his buckteeth, was in permanent agony, until by chance he found a sympathetic dentist: “He said that while he was operating he could reconstruct my mouth. There was no need for me to have an overbite…. I would no longer have buck teeth. My face would be normal!” These sections in the book—so frank as to be almost physically painful to read—have the quality of a rite of passage, a conscious strengthening of his system and his psyche that enabled him to write.

He started to send the plays he was toiling over to literary agents. Most didn’t respond; the one response he received was, in its calm way, devastating: “Your basic premise is not unusual enough, nor is the writing well enough executed for this play to contend in today’s highly competitive market.” He didn’t quarrel with this but went slogging on, despite deep disappointment with his own work, slowly beginning to understand his craft better. He saw Lorraine Hansberry’s second play (she died during its run), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), unloved by critics:

Hansberry taught me that a playwright can take no prisoners, especially with the characters that are closest to his or her heart. Hansberry taught me that once a writer is caught in the centre of a play, all bets are off. Hansberry taught me that your characters themselves, and not your intellect, will tell you where they must go and what they must say.

Fired by these insights, he wrote a nakedly autobiographical play, Next Year in Jerusalem (1968); its central character suffers from Huntington’s and is gay. It opened off-off-Broadway to poor reviews but became in its small way a surprise success. He never told his father about it.

Soon afterward he went to London, where he had always felt he belonged. There he had an epiphany at a performance of a legendary Royal Shakespeare Company production of Troilus and Cressida directed by John Barton. Sherman calls it a homoerotic production. It wasn’t, exactly: it was an erotic one, the smell of sex everywhere, Troilus and Cressida unable to keep their hands off each other, Pandarus the quintessence of lubricious bawdry, and Achilles and Patroclus, his young lover, consumed with each other’s bodies; after the younger man’s death, Achilles’ grief, then his revenge, were titanic. This unprecedented display of male-on-male passion and profound mourning impinged on Sherman’s imagination. He was also astonished to have secured, as a result of a telephone call, a meeting with the doyenne of British play agents, Margaret Ramsay, who not only asked to see his plays but actually read them, then sat him down, giving him detailed praise and precise dramaturgical advice, promising to try to get them performed.

He had a sense of having arrived in paradise, a feeling abruptly dispelled when he returned to New York, where icy indifference met him everywhere:

My mother died too. That’s actually how I announced it in my journal. Someone had given me a rose and I wrote “…a yellow flower—it sits in my typewriter keys and it is dying. My mother died too.”… It’s difficult to mourn absence. I didn’t even wonder about her secrets. It didn’t occur to me then that I would never know what she said on the boardwalk to Betty as we walked past the Garden Pier. I wasn’t even relieved she was at rest. I was numb. It was as if my soul had been Novocained. It took a very long time to wear off.

Shortly after this, he contracted hepatitis. His father had married his long-term mistress, and Sherman went to convalesce with them. His new stepmother extended to him the kindness and consideration he had never known from his mother; also, thanks to his giving up alcohol (which he never resumed drinking), he became healthier than he’d ever been. “Hepatitis,” he says, “was probably the smartest thing that ever happened to me. It was obviously an emotional and corporeal breakdown manifesting itself in yellow eyes.” And out of it came a new play:

As I had reached rock bottom, I felt I had nothing to lose. I was tired of plays in which gay men were suicidal and predestined to misery. I wrote a gentle and loving romance in which the sexual preference of the characters was not a problem, it was simply a fact.

He called it Passing By. He knew, he says, that no one would produce it, so he didn’t bother sending it to theaters. He moved to Venice, California, at that time a crumbling, haunted resort. Fifteen years earlier it had been the location of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil; now it was filled with aging hippies and at its best in the fog, which pleased him by turning it into a spectral, ruined version of Atlantic City. To try to earn money he went to Los Angeles, which, to his surprise, he found to be a haven of sexual healing. The bathhouses were “godsends for someone like me who thought he had no appeal and was able to discover that he did. Slightly.” Work was scarce; he got attached to projects involving Rosalind Russell and Mama Cass, both on their last legs, both gallantly giving of their best in impossible circumstances.

He had meanwhile given Passing By to a New York company. The production entirely missed the character of the piece and failed. “Every playwright,” he says,

has their own sensibility, and somehow that must be captured in the performance. It doesn’t even have to be well done, as long as the individual essence of the writer is there indefinably infiltrating the stage.

Those two sentences could with benefit be inscribed over the stage door of every theater in the world, now that a play is increasingly merely a springboard for the ineffable brilliance of the director.

By then Sherman had come to terms with the threat of Huntington’s and adopted a new strategy. “Denial can be underrated,” he writes. “It served me well in my thirties.” Serenity did not survive a second production of Passing By: it “reaffirmed what is probably the one sensible rule I have learned in life—things can always get worse.” He then read a report in Variety about the formation of a new company in England called Gay Sweatshop; he had Ramsay send them the play. The moment they read it, they programmed it.

It was at this point that I briefly entered Sherman’s story. It was 1975, and I was approached by the company to play the part of Toby. I have to this day no idea why. I was just two years into my career and had packed a lot into those two years—Edinburgh Festival, Rep, West End, Fringe, a tour of Scotland—but this was something completely new and somewhat disconcerting. I was perfectly at ease with myself as a gay man, but I had no real position on gay liberation, regarding it as the sort of thing that politically active men and women liked to get up to. Good luck to them, but what had it to do with me? The idea of a theater group doing plays by gays, about gays, and for gays seemed to me rather silly.

Nonetheless, I read the play. It took me about twenty minutes, and I knew that I wanted to do it more than anything I had ever done in my entire tiny career. In a moment I saw the point of Gay Sweatshop, saw the point of gay liberation, saw the possibility of a play being really important in the lives of its audience in the simplest, most direct way. Unlike many of the plays in that early Gay Sweatshop season—some of them brilliant—it was not a piece of agitprop. It did not seek to convert anyone to anything. It did the most radical thing any play, any novel, any film, any picture can do: it told the truth.

Sherman remembers the group’s mission statement (as it then wasn’t called) to have declared that the company was dedicated to producing works by gay writers that would unflinchingly explore their own world. That isn’t quite what it said, which was: “To make heterosexuals aware of the oppression they exercise or tolerate, and expose and end media misrepresentations of homosexuals.” A noble objective, but one not served by Passing By, in which there was no evidence of oppression or even media misrepresentation; there were just lives being lived, with the usual human components of hope, love, disappointment, and realignment. It was a conventional though very well-made play, a romantic comedy, to be precise, that told the story of a touching, ultimately doomed love affair between two young men—doomed not because they were gay, or because they were flawed, or because of society, but because one of them wanted to go to Paris and the other didn’t. And when they broke up it was touching and tender but not traumatic.

We put the play on at the Almost Free Theatre in ludicrously straitened circumstances, but Gay Sweatshop was committed to doing what it did very well, and Drew Griffiths, one of the company’s founders and a charismatic if emotionally chaotic actor, writer, and director, staged it with wit, charm, and precision. Michael Dickinson and I, playing the two lovers, had no difficulty relating to the play’s perfectly observed truth. It became an intensely charged experience for us: the audience’s emotional engagement was so powerful sometimes that we had to fiercely hold ourselves back so as not to lose the laughs so unerringly plotted into the script.

Halfway through rehearsals, Sherman appeared. Materialized would perhaps be a more precise word. Very tall, very thin, he looked as if a strong wind would knock him down. He was bespectacled, lightly bearded; his eyes were warm, funny, confiding. It was impossible to gauge how old he was. His lightly tanned skin was soft and smooth, like a baby’s, but he seemed to have been through a lot. He could have been thirty or a hundred. This was partly his manner—contained, a little remote—but there was something else: he seemed not to belong to the twentieth century at all. He might have been one of those mythic figures doomed to walk the earth through the ages until they have expiated some obscure, barely recollected offense.

And this was the author of Passing By, the sweetest, lightest of love stories! At first he seemed to be almost completely inaudible, but if you listened very hard, it became apparent, as you might have guessed from his play, that he used words with exquisite precision and brilliant timing. And when he laughed it was life-threatening. But funny though he was, there was nothing frothy about him. His presence seemed hard-won, not in Chalk Farm, where we were rehearsing, but in the world.

When we started performing Passing By, we quickly realized that we were doing something revolutionary. This was not what the Gay Sweatshop manifesto had proclaimed. It did something even more important: it told gay men themselves the unremarkable truth that they fall in love, fall out of love, face difficult choices, move on, and that their lives are full of light and shade, not in a permanent state of hysteria and crisis. The predominantly gay audiences that came to Sherman’s play were taken aback by its avoidance of stereotype and cliché. For them the play offered the shock of recognition. It was not until it existed that we knew what we had been missing: an accurate portrait of ourselves.

Passing By was a big hit, which made Gay Sweatshop, the Almost Free Theatre, Griffiths, Dickinson, and me very happy. But for Sherman it was the turning point of his life as a playwright, perhaps the turning point of his life, period. It was the vindication of the years of unappreciated toil that had preceded it; it was his debut in the London theater, which embraced and endorsed him; and it was the beginning of his relationship with Gay Sweatshop. I remember with crystal clarity the day he came into our little theater in Rupert Street, in the heart of the West End. I was doing my warm-up in the foyer, and I said, through my push-ups, “Nice review in the Times.” “There’s a review in the Times?” I showed it to him. “Sometimes,” it said, “the fringe achieves something perfect.” He was silent. I had the impression that the whole of his life was passing before his eyes, and that that day was the first day of the rest of his life.

When he came back to London, after an unhappy return to New York—his recently opened play Cracks (1976) was deemed by one reviewer “the season’s worst disaster”—he dropped in on rehearsals of Gay Sweatshop’s latest production, Griffiths and Noel Greig’s As Time Goes By, a huge step forward in ambition for the company and a return to its first principles. The play set out to do no less than depict the recent history of attitudes toward homosexuality, from Victorian England (the heroic efforts of Edward Carpenter to establish it as a normal and natural part of life) to Weimar Germany (Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, the rise of the Nazis, and the persecution, incarceration, and murder of gay men), and ending with the Stonewall riots.

The middle section in particular electrified Sherman. Like many people—including, perhaps, most homosexuals—he had no idea that gay men had been sent to the camps and met their deaths there. He had vaguely heard of pink triangles, but the moment in the play when one of the characters escapes from Berlin just before the Nazis capture him pierced Sherman’s dramatist’s heart: the character had in his hand a suitcase containing all his worldly possessions. As he made his bid for freedom, his suitcase turned toward the audience to reveal that it was emblazoned with a pink triangle. This was devastating for Sherman:

Everything I saw whilst living on Christopher Street, all of my arguments with [my friend] Philip, all of my aborted attempts to write a gay love story against a broad canvas, all of my feelings as both a Jewish and a gay man had coalesced when I saw a suitcase with a pink triangle in a dusty rehearsal room.

To prepare for writing Bent, he researched the subject in depth, despite the lack of enthusiasm from the world’s oldest institution devoted to the study of the Holocaust, the Wiener Library in London. When he told the librarian that he “wanted to research what the Nazis did to homosexuals,” she replied sharply, “‘You mean the Nazis as homosexuals.’… ‘No, what they did to homosexuals.’ She stared at me with contempt. My quest did not please her.” His quest displeased many people, not least a number of gay men, the keep-your-head-below-the-parapet brigade; there were serious attempts by some of them to stop the play from being performed.

They were by no means the only obstacle. At first it proved impossible to find a director, gay or straight, or a producer, or even a theater willing to commit to it. Finally, almost by accident, a (gay) director, Robert Chetwyn, was found who had a direct link to Ian McKellen, Sherman’s dream casting for Max, the lead character. Though not yet ready to come out publicly as a gay man, he boldly committed to playing the part. Simultaneously Richard Gere, not gay, committed to doing it on Broadway.

Sherman’s play brutally rips its amiably pleasure-loving hero out of the delicious sexual freedom of the Weimar Republic, plunging him into a desperate and doomed cross-country race to escape his persecutors; once caught, he makes a grotesque attempt to prove his heterosexuality to his captors and finally finds himself in a concentration camp, where he practices his survival skills. There he meets another gay man, Horst, and in defiance of every curtailment of their liberty, they find a way of making love. Death is the only destination of such lives; in an unforgettable image, after Horst is shot by a guard, Max electrifies himself on the camp’s barbed wire, bearing his pink triangle as a badge of honor.

The productions in both London and New York were hugely successful. The play was performed across the free world and remains constantly revived, shocking new generations with its record of rampant homicidal homophobia. Like Ibsen, Sherman brought shocking and dehumanizing events to light in strikingly dramatic form; unlike that of his great predecessor, his work was also a record of transcendent love: amor vincit omnia. But the play’s true originality lies in something for which it was often criticized in early reviews. Rather than writing in a heightened or heroic vein, Sherman insisted on the ordinariness and recognizability of his characters. “I was going to write about the past,” he says in On the Boardwalk, “but it was filtered through the present.” His characters expressed themselves directly, colloquially, humanly, with raw vividness.

On the Boardwalk, like Act One, ends with a glittering Broadway opening, Sherman’s Bent mirroring Hart’s Once in a Lifetime. There is a curious echo between the two books. Hart’s biographer Steven Bach notes that

he understood at once that theater made possible “the art of being somebody else,” somebody who was not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name, an odd way of talking,…and a mother who was a distant drudge.

Sherman’s journey through life was much more challenging than Hart’s, and his subject matter in Bent is much more alarming than anything in Once in a Lifetime, but both men were creatures, first and last, of the theater and—in the fine phrase of their fellow dramatist Edward Bond—its “ancient novelties.” Their books are homages to its curious and enduring power.

A decade before Bent, Sherman visited an astrologer who told him that he had bleak years ahead and that he would achieve success only if he wrote about history. Since Bent he has done precisely that, writing frequently of the great dead—the Sabbatai Sevi (Messiah, 1982), Isadora Duncan (When She Danced, 1985), Aristotle Onassis (Onassis, 2010)—and also about the lives of imaginary people (A Madhouse in Goa, 1989; Some Sunny Day, 1996; Rose, 1999). He has personalized the past, humanized it, confronted it, always seeking the truth to life that imbued Passing By with such profound authenticity. His range is constantly surprising: Onassis incorporates elements of Greek drama; Some Sunny Day introduces us to an angel. Yet the story he tells with such brutal candor and painful honesty in On the Boardwalk is as memorable and affecting as anything he has written for the stage.