Performance

The Birdcage

0 upcoming performances in New York

Mike Nichols’s 1996 film *The Birdcage* reshapes a French farce into an American comedy about a Miami gay couple forced into careful performance when their son brings home the parents of his conservative fiancée. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane play the household’s competing instincts: diplomacy versus defiance, both filtered through love and survival. The screenplay reunites Nichols with Elaine May, their first film collaboration after a storied New York comedy partnership decades earlier. Shown as a free, live outdoor screening at Queens Botanical Garden, it lands as a period document of mainstream visibility, with jokes that sometimes reveal the limits of the era’s tolerance.