Antony Sher was gorgeous in the show, but one of the notes I gave was about the confrontation scene in the third play. An English actor has no problem cutting somebody's bowels out with a sword, but has a lot of trouble yelling at their mother. His production was very like the original, except that New York and West End actors are very different. I chose to absent myself from the London rehearsals to see what the director, Robert Ackerman, would come up with. But the show lasted there another four years. I had my next play ready, and I was writing La Cage aux Folles. I accepted an offer to move it to Broadway, but only because I didn't think it could exist on Broadway and I was ready to leave. We moved from the fringe to off-Broadway, where tickets were sold as fast as we could print them. They both published raves and all of a sudden we were a hit. We were getting ready to close, and then two critics came: Rex Reed of the Daily News and Mel Gussow of the New York Times. At first, we couldn't give tickets away no one wanted to sit through a four-hour gay play. It took me years to find someone to produce them. And yet it was the gay critics and gay culture that rejected the plays, while heterosexual audiences accepted them. They were not written for a straight audience: they are about people struggling with their sexuality, and heterosexuality is not struggled with.
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