"This harrowing account of the way gay men were persecuted in Nazi Germany is now considered seminal, but at the time it was audacious and groundbreaking. In his deeply moving new memoir, On the Boardwalk, Sherman says that even the Royal Court's artistic director was trepidatious. "Stuart Burge called several times to ask if I might consider removing the sex scenes," he writes. "They made him very nervous. The dialogue was extremely graphic. Not everyone knew what two men did together.""
"Sherman's book covers the 40 or so years before Bent made him a success. He writes tenderly about growing up in a Jewish immigrant family in Camden, New Jersey, where his father was a charming narcissist and his mother was cruelly consumed by Huntington's disease. For the first few decades of his life, Sherman mistakenly believed that he would inherit this progressive genetic condition, which gradually affects a person's mood, movement and ability to communicate."
Martin Sherman recounts his life before his 1979 breakthrough with Bent, describing a Jewish immigrant upbringing in Camden, New Jersey, a charmingly narcissistic father, and a mother devastated by Huntington's disease. He feared inheriting the progressive genetic illness while coping with acne, extreme thinness, and fragile self-confidence as he pursued a playwright career in 1970s New York. He witnessed cultural shifts firsthand, including stumbling into the 1969 Stonewall Riots, and worked with figures such as Mama Cass and Rosalind Russell. He relocated to London forty-five years ago and continued producing notable theatrical and film work.
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