B6 eZ re the washington post.wednesday, march 11 , 2020
obituaries
Mr. Crowley studied drama at
Catholic University in Washing-
ton, receiving a bachelor’s degree
in 1957, b ut was home in Mississip-
pi for the filming of director Elia
Kazan’s m ovie “ Baby Doll.”
After introducing himself to t he
filmmaker, he talked h is way into a
job a s a production assistant, later
working on “The Fugitive Kind”
(1960), directed by Sidney Lumet,
and “ Splendor in t he G rass” (1961),
a Kazan film s tarring Wood.
Mr. Crowley “was hired to pick
my m om up at h ome and drive her
to work every day,” Gregson Wag-
ner said by phone. “When ‘Splen-
dor’ wrapped he didn’t have a job,
so she h ired h im as her assistant.”
He later developed a close
friendship with Wood’s husband
Wagner (they divorced and later
remarried), who starred in “Hart
to Hart” and helped recruit Mr.
Crowley to t he s how as a producer
and e xecutive s cript consultant.
Mr. Crowley’s other plays includ-
ed “Remote Asylum” (1970); “A
Breeze From the Gulf” (1973), a
semiautobiographical work that
ran off-Broadway; “For Reasons
That Remain Unclear” (1993),
about a sexually abusive Catholic
priest; and “The Men From the
Boys,” a sequel to “The Boys” t hat
premiered in San F rancisco i n 2002.
He also wrote TV movies, in-
cluding “There Must Be a Pony”
(1986), s tarring Wagner a nd E liza-
beth Ta ylor, and helped write the
picture book “Eloise Ta kes a
Bawth” ( 2002).
Mr. Crowley, who leaves no im-
mediate survivors, d escribed writ-
ing as a kind of alchemy, in which
he transformed coal-black experi-
ences from h is o wn l ife i nto a kind
of theatrical gold, as a well as a
form of spiritual nourishment for
himself a nd his audience.
“I feel my whole life is observ-
ing,” he told the Advocate in 1996,
“and I wish I could get into the
action. I came from a very ugly
background and a very ugly small
town with people with very ugly
attitudes. I had a need for beauty,
and I t hink I share that with lots of
people. That need comes simply
because of all of the sordidness
and unhappiness and resentment
as well as the calamity of growing
up gay when I was growing up.
That’s a roundabout way of saying
I never felt too i ncluded.”
[email protected]Mr. Crowley went on to write
several more plays but primarily
supported himself with television
work, including on the ABC detec-
tive series “Hart to Hart.” A nd while
“The Boys in the Band” was pro-
duced in translation around the
world, it remained far from Broad-
way until 2018, when a star-stud-
ded revival featured actors includ-
ing Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto
and Robin De Jesús, who was nom-
inated for a To ny a s Emory.
The production r eceived a To ny
Award for best revival of a play,
which served as vindication of
sorts for Mr. Crowley. He had
spent years feeling misunder-
stood by members of the gay com-
munity, s aid Murphy, who recalled
an emotional exchange with the
playwright after the award cere-
mony.
“You gave me something I’ve
never had before,” Mr. Crowley
told Murphy, “ which is peace.”
Edward Martino Crowley was
born in Vicksburg, Miss., on
Aug. 21, 1935. “My father was a
drunkard and my mother was a
hypochondriac, dependent upon
drugs,” h e once said.Nonetheless, he added, the play
“created possibilities for present-
ing gay material on the stage,”
paving the way for gay characters
in Broadway shows such as “Find
Your Way Home” a nd “Butley.”New York Times theater critic
Clive Barnes called “The Boys in
the B and” “ the frankest treatment
of homosexuality I have ever seen
on the stage,” declaring it so vitri-
olic it made Albee’s “Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf?” “seem like a
vicarage tea party.” Mr. Crowley’s
script, he added, “remorselessly
peels away the pretensions of its
characters and reveals a pessi-
mism so uncompromising in its
honesty t hat it becomes i n itself a n
affirmation of life.”
That pessimism was bracingly
evident in one of the play and
movie’s most shocking lines —
“You show me a happy homosexu-
al and I’ll s how you a gay c orpse” —
and d efended by M r. C rowley, who
said offering a stream of purely
“positive images” was the role of
political a ctivists, not artists.
In the aftermath of Stonewall,
some critics mellowed on “The
Boys in the Band,” with LGBTQ
scholar Michael Bronski writing
that Mr. Crowley “made sure that
heterosexual critics and audienc-
es saw what they really believed:
gay men who were unhappy and
willfully cruel to one another.”known to be gay, a fact that
spurred a notorious New York
Ti mes essay by critic Stanley
Kauffmann, who lamented “dis-
guised homosexual influence” in
the theater and called on drama-
tists to address gay themes head-
on, without using straight charac-
ters as stand-ins.
His 1966 essay amounted to a
kind of dare for Mr. Crowley, a gay
30-year-old screenwriter from
Mississippi with a self-described
“sugar-cane accent.” He was then
broke, unemployed and frequent-
ly drunk, albeit building a happier
life for himself in Hollywood than
he had as a young man in the
South, w here he was molested by a
family friend as a child but found
refuge w atching movies and plays.
In a 2 009 episode of the public
television show “Theater Talk,”
Mr. Crowley recalled writing “The
Boys in the Band” while staying at
the home of a wealthy friend, ac-
tress Diana L ynn, the d aughter-in-
law of New York Post publisher
Dorothy Schiff. Living for five
weeks “in the lap of luxury —
nannies, butlers, maids and
cooks” — he returned to his own
home with the script of “The Boys
in the Band,” which took its name
from a throwaway line in the 1954
remake of “A S tar Is Born.”
“There was a little of me in all
the characters in that play,” Mr.
Crowley once said. “I was deter-
mined to write a new kind of dra-
ma about homosexuality. All the
plays I had ever seen on the subject
were stereotyped, sensational, em-
barrassed or evasive. I tried to be
thoughtful and honest and adult.”
Centered on a group of g ay m en
gathered f or a birthday p arty, “The
Boys in the Band” premiered off-
Broadway at Theater Four on Eas-
ter Sunday, 1968. T he production
“did for plays what ‘Oklahoma!’
did for musicals,” t he playwright
Neil Simon later told writer-pro-
ducer Richard Kramer, adding
“he’d never seen such honesty on
the stage before,” according to a
1993 New York Times r eport.
The original production never
made it to Broadway but ran for
more than two years and 1,001
performances, with a cast that in-
cluded Cliff Gorman in an Obie-
winning turn a s Emory, who drops
an f-bomb to deliver one of the
play’s iconic lines about trading
sex for a drink.BY HARRISON SMITHMart Crowley, a To ny Award-
winning playwright whose comic
tragedy “The Boys in the Band”
helped bring openly gay charac-
ters onto the stage and screen,
emerging as a landmark depiction
of gay life more than a year before
the Stonewall riots galvanized a
national liberation movement,
died March 7 at a hospital in Man-
hattan. He was 8 4.
The cause was complications
from heart surgery, said a god-
daughter, Natasha Gregson Wag-
ner. Her mother, actress Natalie
Wood, was one of Mr. Crowley’s
closest friends, hiring him as an
assistant and housing him from
time to time in the home she
shared with her husband Robert
Wagner.
For much of his career, M r. C row-
ley was overshadowed by gay play-
wrights such as Larry Kramer,
whose drama “The Normal Heart”
wrestled with the A IDS crisis of the
early 1980s, and To ny Kushner,
whose two-part epic “A ngels in
America” won the Pulitzer Prize.
But his 1968 examination of gay
identity, repression and self-loath-
ing was a milestone f or a nyone who
recognized themselves in “The
Boys in the Band,” even if some of
the play’s acid-tongued dialogue
would come t o seem dated.
“We all stand firmly on the
shoulders of that play,” said writer
and producer Ryan Murphy, who
brought “The Boys in the Band” t o
Broadway in 2018 and is produc-
ing an upcoming movie adapta-
tion for Netflix.
As a gay youth in Indiana, Mur-
phy added by phone, “I thought I
was an alien” — a sentiment that
vanished after seeing the 1970
movie adaptation, directed by
William Friedkin and written and
produced by Mr. Crowley. Since
then, he said, “The play never left
my s ubconsciousness.”
Mr. Crowley w rote “ The Boys in
the Band” at a time when homo-
sexuality was criminalized across
most of the country and gay char-
acters were rarely seen in pop
culture, often appearing only for
comic effect or in marginal roles
that ended in tragedy.
Nonetheless, three of the coun-
try’s leading playwrights — Ed-
ward Albee, William Inge a nd Te n-
nessee Williams — were widely
Mart crowley, 84
Wrote landmark gay drama ‘The Boys in the Band’
cBs photo archive/getty imageschrystyna cZaJaKoWsKy/associated press
ABOVE: Mart Crowley, author
of “The Boys in the Band,” a
1968 play with openly gay
characters, i n New York in- TOP: A scene from
William Friedkin’s 1970 film
adaptation of Crowley’s play.
BY HARRISON SMITHDonald A. Padden, who be-
came a revered leader of the deaf
community as a professor and
mentor to generations of stu-
dents at Gallaudet University,
and who sought to empower deaf
teenagers through a summer
camp he helped organize in the
woods of northern Minnesota,
died Feb. 19 at an assisted-living
center in Frederick, Md. He was
98.
His death was announced in a
statement by Washington-based
Gallaudet, which called him “an
elder statesman of the Gallaudet
and Deaf communities.” He had
recently been hospitalized for a
lung infection, said his daughter,
Carol Padden, dean of social sci-
ences at the University of Califor-
nia at San Diego.
Mr. Padden taught physical ed-
ucation classes for more than
four decades at Gallaudet, the
nation’s premier university for
the deaf and hard of hearing. A
former standout athlete and
graduate of the school, he was
known as the last surviving mem-
ber of the Five Iron Men, a Gallau-
det basketball squad that at-
tained postseason glory in 1943
despite a last-place finish during
the regular season.
For years, he welcomed young
men to campus as the school’s
“hygiene” instructor, charged
with delivering a crash course in
nutrition, wellness and sex edu-
cation as part of a curriculum
that aimed to offer an education
in adulthood as well as the liberal
arts. He also had stints as the
men’s basketball coach and direc-
tor of the intramural program,
where he encouraged women to
participate in sports long before
Title IX banned sex discrimina-
tion in collegiate athletics.
But like certain professors
scattered across the country, in-
structors whose names are little
known outside of the campuses
where they spend their days, Mr.
Padden was admired less for any
singular academic accomplish-
ment than for the years he spent
offering gentle advice and en-
couragement to those who
crossed his path.
“What is remarkable about
him is his total dedication to
furthering the lot of the deaf of all
ages,” t he Gallaudet To wer Clock
wrote in 1974, dedicating the
school yearbook to Mr. Padden.
“He does not concentrate on one
level, nor does he confine educa-
tion to the classroom. He has
worked, and still works out of
sheer heart, with small children,
teenagers, college students and
with the older crowd. No person
who comes into contact with him
is forgotten; he keeps track of
them all, exhorts them on to
bigger things, and takes pride in
their accomplishments.”
“It is his character that strikes
us the most,” t he dedication con-
tinued. “He is truly one of us. He i s
involved in our activities, our
events, our welfare. He has a
genuine and deep-rooted concern
for the students. His sense of
humor is enormous, and when he
laughs, all of him laughs. He is so
human that one cannot fail to
take notice of and admire this
exceptional quality of his.”
Mr. Padden’s wife of 72 years,
the former Agnes Minor, was a
fellow Gallaudet graduate who
taught English at the school. To -
gether, they formed “one of the
most recognizable and iconic
couples in our history,” the uni-
versity said in a statement.
But his influence extended well
beyond Kendall Green, as Gallau-
det’s campus is known.
Beginning in 1970, he helped
organize the National Associa-
tion of the Deaf’s Youth Leader-
ship Camp, which was considered
one of the first summer camps for
the deaf when it opened in Penn-
sylvania the previous year. With
co-founder Frank Turk, a child-
hood friend, he acquired a 32-
acre plot near the northern Min-
nesota town of Pengilly, where
high school students from across
the country came to learn team-
building and outdoor skills.
Mr. Padden spent nearly 20
years with the camp, and he was
credited with showing teens that
they could thrive not only in the
wilderness — where he taught
them how to build a fire and use a
compass — but in the world at
large. The Yo uth LeadershipCamp later moved to Oregon, and
a 50th anniversary event last
summer drew a wide-ranging
group of alumni, who had gone
on to thrive in industries that
were once barred to deaf individ-
uals like Mr. Padden.
“A nyone who’s ever achieved
something as a deaf person,” Car-
ol Padden said in an interview,
“very likely went through this
camp.”
Donald Alvin Padden was born
in Chicago on June 26, 1921. Both
his parents were deaf, and his
father worked as a printer, a job
that has traditionally been filled
by deaf men at n ewspapers across
the country — including at The
Washington Post, where Donald
Padden once operated a Linotype
machine to supplement his fami-
ly’s income.
His mother died when he was6, and Donald was sent to live
with an aunt in Minnesota, where
he attended the Minnesota
School for the Deaf, now the State
Academy for the Deaf in Farib-
ault. Mr. Padden excelled on the
basketball team and, after gradu-
ating in 1940, entered what was
then known as Gallaudet College.
His basketball career undoubt-
edly peaked in 1943, when he and
his team won the Mason-Dixon
Conference tournament despite
posting a 4-11 regular season re-
cord and playing as the last of
eight seeds. Mr. Padden and his
starting teammates became
known as the Five Iron Men
because they played every minute
of every postseason game, stun-
ning top-seeded Randolph-Ma-
con College before beating Amer-
ican University and finally the
University of Delaware, 42-40, toseize Gallaudet’s last conference
title.
Mr. Padden joined the Gallau-
det faculty soon after graduating
in 1945. He later received a mas-
ter’s degree in physical education
from the University of Maryland,
after writing a thesis on balance,
orientation and spinal meningi-
tis. His daughter said that he
conducted experiments in which
deaf men were blindfolded and
then told to jump into the pool,
where they found it unexpectedly
difficult to find their way to the
surface.
Because of damage to their
inner ear, some of his subjects
were “immune” to motion sick-
ness and went on to participate in
early NASA experiments for hu-
man spaceflight. Mr. Padden
might have been interested in
participating in such research
himself, were it not for accessibil-
ity barriers and sheer prejudice.
“If he had been born later he
might have been a scientist,” Car-
ol Padden said, “but he never had
an opportunity. At the time, peo-
ple had very low expectations [of
the deaf ].”
Mr. Padden retired from the
Gallaudet faculty in 1987. He was
inducted into the university’s ath-
letics hall of fame in 1995, and the
school’s gymnasium floor was
named in his honor in 2017. He
went on to maintain an active
lifestyle well into his 90s, using a
rotary lawn mower for exercise in
lieu of a gas-powered cutter.
His wife died in October. In
addition to his daughter, of Del
Mar, Calif., survivors include a
son, Robert Padden of Frederick,
Md., and three granddaughters.
Mr. Padden was fond of an old
proverb: “Because we are all on
the same ship, we will all either
sail or sink together.” “He really
cared about other people more
than himself, and their success
more than himself,” s aid Turk, the
Youth Leadership Camp organiz-
er. Recalling the students whom
Mr. Padden had once addressed
around the campfire, he added,
“Those kids were twice or three
times more successful than they
ever would have been without
him.”
[email protected]donald a. Padden, 98
Revered Gallaudet professor’s summer camp empowered deaf teenagers
gallaudet university photosTOP: Donald A. Padden was the
last surviving member of the
Five Iron Men, a legendary
Gallaudet basketball team.
ABOVE: As a professor, he
mentored numerous students.