Martin Sherman is the author of Bent (1979), one of the significant American plays of the twentieth century because of its historical reexamination of the Holocaust and realistic depiction of homosexuals. Yet, he is one of the most underappreciated and unknown American playwrights, because he and his plays defy easy compartmentalization or classification. Sherman, descended from immigrant roots, is a gay, Jewish American artist. He repeatedly refuses to be characterized by only one aspect of his personality. In a 1980 interview with Terry Helbing, Sherman argued that gay persons should not be typified as just gay; instead he would "like to see everybody who's gay living very openly as gay within broad society and being who they are very freely. Being gay wouldn't be just who they are; all aspects of who they are would shine forth."

The same philosophy of diversification is present in his plays, which document the...