These plays marked a major cultural turning point, considering the outright censorship that gay playwrights faced in the preceding decades. produced a reading of “Haunted Host” in 2008 in an evening honoring Robert Patrick for his contribution to gay theater over the past five decades. More recently, “Lady Bright” was produced at Met Theater in Hollywood in 2002 and at TOSOS II in Greenwich Village in 2006. Both plays were frequently revived in subsequent years, including at San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros in the late 1970s. and internationally, including a 1975 Boston-area production that featured Harvey Fierstein in his first male role. Similarly, since its successful inaugural run at the Cino, Patrick’s “The Haunted Host” has reached countless viewers in its many dozens of productions in the U.S.
Premiering four years before Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band opened Off-Broadway, Wilson’s one-act was the longest running play ever to appear at the Caffe Cino, where it was performed over two hundred times to consistently packed houses.
The plays were Lanford Wilson’s “The Madness of Lady Bright” and Robert Patrick’s “The Haunted Host.” In 1964, despite a social climate of homophobia that pervaded American life for the second third of the 20th century, two one-act plays presented Off-Off-Broadway at the Caffe Cino revolutionized how gay characters could be represented theatrically. IF “GAY THEATER” is defined as being by, for, and about uncloseted gay people, then 2014 arguably marks the 50th anniversary of the genre’s existence.