The first thing one notices about Mart Crowley, the man who wrote the very funny and very sad play about homosexuality called The Boys in the Band, is his uncanny resemblance in appearance and manner to Woody Allen. Like Allen, Crowley is small, boyish (age: 34), and balding. His speech comes fast and sharp. He cocks his head slightly after he has told a joke, in anticipation of the listener's laugh. And, like Allen, Crowley wears glasses. However, the glasses are not horn-rimmed, but wire-rimmed, like Peter Fonda's.

Two weeks ago today, Crowley spent the afternoon in Boston to talk about the film version of Boys, which he both adapted for the screen and produced. It was a week before the film was to have its world premiere in New York and Crowley gave the impression that he was running a little scared. As we walked with the film's press agent into a large Cadillac limousine waiting outside the MGM Screening Room in downtown Boston, he was silent. It wasn't until we were seated in the living room of his enormous Ritz-Carlton suite and room service had provided a supply of drinks that he opened up.

Crowley took off the jacket of his expensive-looking, continental three piece suit and leaned back on the couch. He talked about the great increase in overtly-homosexual theatre in New York since Boys opened off Broadway (where it is still running) in 1968. "These plays come along," he said, "and homosexuals rush and descend on them-just like taste-makers anywhere else. But that audience runs out, and after two weeks these shows have to be playing to Mr. and Mrs. America.

"Of course, anyone can come along and write another play about homosexuality-as long as it's good. God, how many things have been written about the Kennedy assassination? You just have to make sure your own point of view comes through. Look, maybe Genet writes plays about nothing else but homosexuality-but he's good and no one says, hey, he's writing about that again."

Crowley's next play, opening next fall, is called Remote Asylum. He described it as being about "escapism-drugs, booze, sex, a passport or plane ticket that lets you think you can run away from yourself." The five characters include two heterosexual couples and Michael, a central (and homosexual) character of Boys. Like his first play, Asylum will be in the tradition of the "well-made" American play. But his third play, Crowley said, is "moving further along." All the characters are straight and the structure of the work is influenced by Pirandello, whom he admires greatly.

As for the conception of Boys, Crowley said, "I loved Virginia Woolf and it influenced me a lot-but the real inspiration was the Salinger story. 'Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.' And movies like All About Eve [Mankiewicz's melodrama about Hollywood stardom] and Hitchcock's Rope, which gave me the idea of using confined quarters as a dramatic device."

Crowley likes the movies and would like eventually to write directly for the screen, directing his own screen play. He feels he is ready to do so now that he has gotten his feet wet producing the filmed Boys.

"It's great, absolutely fabulous, what's happening in the movies," he said. "The day of the Hollywood-made-and-controlled film is over. The day of the multi-million dollar monolith like Hello. Dolly is over. The only reason I'd make a movie in Hollywood is to make a picture about Hollywood, as it were- shot on location." He leaned over and laughed raucously, his eyes glowing mischievously at the prospect. "Seen All About Eve a lot?" he asked.

"The movies this year have been incredible," he went on. "I liked them all: Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, They Shoot Horses, Z..... All these great movies in one year! And productivity! Antonioni at least did something, whether for better or worse..." He caught my eye and smiled before the kill. "... And there was one a week from Godard." He started to smile broadly. "....And a Truffaut or two..." He leaned over and laughed. "Make that: a Truffaut or three..." Hysterical laughter. He started another drink.

"A lot of Hollywood studios offered me a lot of money for Boys, " Crowley said, but he took a smaller offer from Cinema Center, so that he could retain artistic control and the original off-Broadway cast, all unknowns. "One studio," he explained, "wanted to use old stars in 'these great little cameo parts' to rev up their careers. Paramount kept talking about a title song-they wanted to sell the picture with a hit record!

"I had some of my own ideas for publicizing the film, but I got vetoed. There was this Farlcy Granger picture in the forties which had the advertising slogan 'See it with someone you love.' I wanted the ads for Boys to say, 'See it with someone you suspect.'" More laughter.

We talked about The Damned, perhaps the only other major film this year to have a strong homosexual point of view. Crowley said he thought that film was "fabulous and terrible... Jack Lemmon calls it The Boys in the Bund. "

HE DOES not want to leave the theatre entirely for the movies, however, as he feels strongly attached to "the craft of writing for the stage." He admires many playwrights who are working now. "Arthur Miller still writes a hell of a play," he said. " The Price was the most literate, absorbing evening I had had in the theatre for a long time. And Williams, of course, is the master-if he still has a gasp in him. Albee-everyone's waiting for him to do something. And Terrence McNally and Israel Horovitz are very talented too. So is Ron Cowen; he has already written Summertree and he's only 22."

Crowley, like the character of Michael in Boys, was brought up in a small town in Mississippi, where he saw many movies but no plays until he left at age 17. "To quote myself," he said, "'There was no Shubert Theatre in Hot Coffee, Msisissippi." (The line belongs to Michael in Boys. )

He left home to go to Georgetown University in Washington (as had Michael in the film), but "only stayed about five minutes," before going on to Catholic University Drama School, which has produced such theatre people as Jon Voight, Walter and Jean Kerr, and Robert Moore, who made his New York directorial debut with Boys. (William Friedkin directed the film.)