Review of Forty Deuce

This is a particularly painful viewing experience, but not for the reasons you may think. Alan Bowne, who passed away from AIDS, was one of the most astonishingly gifted and promising young playwrights at the dawn of the 1980's, a far more dangerous and important theatrical voice than either Tony Kushner ("Angels In America") or Jonathan Larson ("Rent"). As a stage play, this became an overnight sensation Off-Off Broadway in 1981 at The Perry Street Theatre, directed by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer ("The Shadow Box") with a much more compelling and powerfully charismatic cast of actors, causing stunned audiences to reel from what they were seeing. Less about junkie teenage gay male hustlers and their Times Square pimp, and more about the unconscious desperation for any momentary or authentic recognition of sentient human feeling under the relentless oppression of free enterprise, The New York Times raved about the play and the production, describing the highly stylized dialogue as "profanity so potently over-the-top as to border on a kind of heightened and epic Shakespearean poetry". Celebrities and producers started flocking to the sold-out SRO performances; the word-of-mouth was so intense that a media frenzy started to build and the show was on it's way to Off-Broadway, and then hopefully a full-scale Broadway production along the lines of Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths". It was about to set the New York theatre world on fire, with standing ovations happening every night. Instead, it's legacy became this: a deservedly ignored and horrid little film, a medium that it didn't fit into or need, arranged by disgustingly idiotic and greedy backers that had no business going anywhere near something so special; it demanded only the very greatest and most insightful of talents involved, which never came to pass due to individuals who had no grasp of it's finer sociological implications and had no understanding of it's dark and prescient political power. It remains to this day one of the saddest examples of a potential theatrical masterpiece turned into forgettable Z-grade movie trash by dim-witted philistines only interested in catering to the basest voyeurism and titillation.