CHARLIE CARVER DOES IT HIS OWN WAY

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A little over a decade ago, Charlie Carver was looking for a monologue to perform in the theater section of his high school library when he came upon Mart Crowley’s seminal work about gay life, The Boys in the Band. The play, a surprise hit Off Broadway when it premiered in 1968—drawing crowds that included Marlene Dietrich, Jackie Kennedy, and Rudolf Nureyev—centers on a group of gay men at an emotionally fraught birthday party that becomes increasingly tense as they become increasingly drunk and is widely celebrated as one of the first mainstream depictions of domestic gay life on the stage. Now fifty years old, the play shows its age in parts and Carver admits that, even as a teenager then coming to terms with his sexuality, he didn’t really connect with it. “I remember looking through it as a young guy figuring himself out,” he recalls. “I’m not going to say that I sat down and did a thorough job reading it, but I remember flipping through it and thinking, ‘I don’t know how this relates to me. I don’t know if there’s something immediate in it that I am attracted to,’ so I put it down and didn’t really know what it was about until this all came around.”

This summer, Carver, twenty-nine, has had the opportunity to study The Boys in the Band quite intimately, as he makes his Broadway debut as Cowboy, a young hustler who is brought to the party as a birthday present, as part of a cast composed entirely of openly gay actors, including Zachary Quinto, Jim Parsons, Andrew Rannells, and Matt Bomer. Produced by Ryan Murphy and directed by the Tony-winner Joe Mantello, the new production is both a time capsule of the past and still strikingly relevant in a time when gay rights continue to be under assault and the fight for diverse representation in entertainment endures. “I think it’s so special to have nine out gay actors telling this story fifty years later and really being able to bring their individuality to these roles,” Carver says. “It’s been so wonderful to have both young and then older gay men who really grew up with this play as a first look at other people like them really having a great time and ultimately being very moved coming out of the theater.”

Carver’s Cowboy, young and blond and dressed in a Stetson and tight jeans, is not especially bright—Carver laughingly calls him “very present”—but, despite his difficult circumstances, he seems filled with optimism and hope. “There’s something sort of poetic about Cowboy,” Carver explains. “There’s something very natural about him.” As he watches the friends bicker, tease, and insult each other, he chimes in dimwittedly now and then but his spirit never flags, even when the barbs are directed at him. The Boys in the Band has been both acclaimed and criticized for its piercingly honest depiction of gay shame, a stigma Cowboy appears able to avoid somewhat. “He has experienced a lot of difficult and degrading situations and experiences shame as somebody who’s really alone,” says Carver, “but there’s an innocence to Cowboy that I think is very special. I think that innocence inflects his sexuality too, like, ‘Well, this is who I am and what I really want is love.’ It’s funny to think that as the young character in the room, Cowboy will go and live through so many big changes in terms of the gay rights movement in the United States, so it’s been fun to think about where he might end up.”

The Boys in the Band holds a unique position in the history of gay theater as the complicated forebear of more nuanced works like The Normal Heart and Angels in America that followed in its footsteps. They play was condemned even half a century ago for playing into stereotypes of gay men as catty, campy, and addicted to psychoanalysis, which Carver acknowledges, pointing to the groundbreaking timing of its premiere just a year before the Stonewall riots that sparked the gay rights movement. When the film version appeared in 1970, “all of a sudden what was celebrated at first about this play being the first window into gay life at home ever onstage suddenly became the very thing that it was crucified for, which is having men talk about their shame and their trepidations,” he explains. “After Stonewall, you have groups like the Mattachine Society saying, ‘Hey, we really need to step away from gay men only being portrayed as suicidal and self-loathing or villainous and duplicitous and we need to move away from this notion that homosexuality is something to be pathologized.’ This play was such a product of its time that it was not useful for the gay rights movement and suddenly people were really scared of it being one of the very few representations of gay men in popular culture.”

In 2018, with increasing reflections of the LGBTQ community, the play no longer carries that responsibility of serving as the sole standard-bearer. Carver himself is probably best known for playing a gay werewolf on MTV’s global hit Teen Wolf. (His straight twin Max portrayed his character’s straight twin.) “I got to play a gay character where the sexuality was secondary to the story and I got to be a gay character who kicked ass and took down villains and had superpowers,” Carver emphasizes. “As a kid, I wish that I’d had some version of that to daydream about, so getting to do that for young people was really great. It’s been really special meeting people all over the world who the show helped.”

Carver was not professionally out when he joined the cast of Teen Wolf and he admits that “there was some fear from my reps” about playing a gay character. Nonetheless, he and Max decided to pursue the project (coincidentally, the show’s creator Jeff Davis is gay and has a straight twin), but only on their own terms. “When Max and I went in for that part, we both wanted to be able to audition for the other role and flip it,” he recalls. “I went in saying to myself, ‘I don’t want to feel limited in this way in other people’s eyes, particularly if they know who I am,’ so when we did the test we flipped and did each role once, which was really fun. I think that we knew if we were going to move forward that it would probably be me as Ethan and Max as Aiden, but I think for our own sakes, we went, ‘Okay this is who we are, so you’re going to have to see both versions.’”

Born in San Francisco, Carver had an early affinity for performing. “I was very lucky to have parents who liked taking us to live performances and shows, so as a kid I always wanted to reproduce them in the living room and make these crazy skits or musical number,” he laughs. “Then as I started to figure out a little bit more about who I was and particularly about my sexuality, I got really afraid of it, which to me is so sad. I stepped away from the theater and any kind of theatricality and threw myself into school and sports and that felt false. Finally, as I started to accept who I was, I realized that it was what I wanted to do.” He transferred to the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in high school before enrolling at the University of Southern California. One day after his first year in Los Angeles, he was approached by an agent while shopping for shoes and, two weeks later, was cast, alongside Max, as Felicity Huffman’s son on Desperate Housewives, then one of the biggest hits on television.

Since then, Carver has matured as an actor both professionally and personally, with a role on HBO’s dark series The Leftovers and a part in Dustin Lance Black’s miniseries about the gay rights movement, When We Rise. Early in 2016, he posted an image of a sign reading, “Be Who You Needed When You Were Younger,” five times in a row on Instagram, along with a touching explanation of his decision to come out. “I now believe that by omitting this part of myself from the record, I am complicit in perpetuating the suffering, fear, and shame cast upon so many in the world,” he wrote, describing the move as partly for himself and partly for others. “It was this wave in my mid- to late twenties where I felt like I wasn’t living my personal life authentically enough,” he recalls. “Part of it was a bit of anger at the world, but most of it was that I didn’t want to perpetuate this notion that gay people, particularly young gay people, couldn’t act and be out and have a career. Right now I’m working with so many of my heroes who have these really great careers that they put on the line in some ways by claiming who they were and being proud of their identity. I went, ‘I need to do that for myself now too and fuck the consequences.’”

Carver’s coming out also helped to distinguish him from his twin as the two look to pursue independent projects after years of working as a matched set. “Being a twin and fighting to be seen as an individual now as opposed to just one of a unit has been a bit of an obstacle for myself,” he admits. “I would definitely say a lot needs to change in terms of representation and openness and the weight put on one’s gender identity and sexual identity, but as an individual, I feel like there’s been a bigger fight for me to be my own person as opposed to just part of this unit.”

Conventional Hollywood wisdom says that even today, coming out can kill your career, but in Carver’s case it seems only to have made his work more layered. He made a highly anticipated return to Teen Wolf last year with a new boyfriend played by Colton Haynes, who also revealed he is gay in 2016. His performance in The Boys in the Band, as with his fellow actors, gains richness thanks to the historic nature of the cast. “People ask me, ‘How has it been for you since you came out in this business?’ and to be honest I don’t necessarily know what all of the implications of that were,” he says, “but as a person I feel much more confident and honest and able to focus on the work.”

The Boys in the Band continues through August 11 at the Booth Theatre, New York.