Fierstein, as Arnold, strutting around his apartment in his floppy rabbit slippers, cracking jokes, sharing affection with both his lover and his foster son, and going ferociously head-to-head with his disapproving mother, played by Estelle Getty, then unknown.Ī play in which the gay character was smart, funny and fully alive? A revelation.Ī couple of years later, after “Torch Song” had transferred to Broadway, Barry and I were in my cramped living room on a Sunday night in June, sitting on the floor and watching the Tony Awards.

Previously my only experiences of gay theater had been plays like “The Boys in the Band,” “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” “Tea and Sympathy” and “Streamers” - plays where the gay character was either closeted or bitter or suicidal, and usually all three.

Fierstein’s work, three plays that give us a progressively dramatic and illuminating portrait of a man who laughs, and makes us laugh, to keep from collapsing.”īarry and I were theater geeks, and had been since the day we had separately moved to New York two years earlier: Cutting out of work early to stand in line for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park, getting rush tickets at the Public Theater, spending our Saturdays at the TKTS booth in Times Square, occasionally second-acting Broadway shows that we couldn’t afford a ticket to.īut this play sounded like something we had never seen before.Ī few days later, we headed over to the Richard Allen Center on West 62nd Street and mounted six narrow flights of stairs, to confront a stage no bigger than my living room, and entered a cramped theater filled with others who had heard the same siren call. “Those alterations - Arnold is a homosexual and a professional ‘drag queen’ - are the substance but not the sum of Mr. “At the end of a long, infinitely rewarding evening in the company of Arnold and his family and friends, he confesses with a sigh that he has always wanted exactly the life that his mother has had - ‘with certain minor alterations.’ “Arnold Beckoff, the lonely but far-from-forlorn hero of Harvey Fierstein’s ‘Torch Song Trilogy,’ is a die-hard romantic who takes his heart, soul and fatalism from the 1920s ballads that give the work its title and its tone,” the critic Mel Gussow wrote.

Its headline was simple enough: “ Fierstein’s ‘Torch Song.’” But what followed was anything but. On a Sunday morning in the fall of 1981, I was sitting in my fourth-floor walk-up studio apartment in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, flipping through that day’s New York Times, when I was struck by a theater review that ran on one of the far back pages of the news section.

Harvey fierstein torch song trilogy