“Yes, Harvey Fierstein is the downtown drag artist who paraded uptown at a spectacularly young age. He’s the gay activist who’s been knocking down closet doors ever since. He’s been a Virgil of the gay bar backroom, written plays with beds center stage and moaning in the dark. But if you think Harvey Fierstein is all about sex, you’ve been staring at the wrong organ. It’s the heart he’s trained on. Your heart. Mine. Our group heart. Our national heart.”
—Todd London, Artistic Director of New Dramatists
In 1977, Harvey Fierstein embarked on a whirlwind romance that unraveled almost as quickly as it began. As the inevitable split approached, he inadvertently tried to heighten the break-up’s theatricality: “Even during the last four-hour phone call, I’d keep thinking. ‘Hmmm, that’s good—better write that down,’” he recalls. “But I didn’t understand what was happening at the time, and there I was: no job, no money, and now no lover.” He sank into a deep depression, until a therapist friend told him he could “kill himself, or write a play about it.” That night, Fierstein started to write the first act of what would become Torch Song Trilogy.
The three one-acts that comprise Torch Song Trilogy—The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!—chart approximately seven years in the life of Arnold Beckoff, a brazen drag performer who has grown weary of casual flings and longs for real, lasting relationship. Each act has its own distinct style, illuminating Arnold’s desires, insecurities, setbacks, and triumphs as his search for love, family, and respect unfolds. The three acts individually debuted Off Off Broadway over a period of two years, beginning in 1978, before Fierstein fused them together under the title Torch Song Trilogy. The new epic piece premiered in 1981, and within a year transferred Off Broadway and then to Broadway, where it ran for 1,222 performances. Fierstein won two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor, for his work.
The commercial success of a gay-themed play—one that eschewed stereotypes and depicted emotional complexity—was unprecedented. Fierstein’s personal heartbreak may have inspired Torch Song Trilogy, but with humor, heart, and inventive theatricality, he elevates what could have been a simple cathartic exercise into an exquisite and universally human journey. With Arnold, Fierstein created a character, recounts LGBT historian Lillian Faderman, “that you'd think would be the least sympathetic to a mainstream matinee audience…and made everyone understand that a drag queen had feelings—that Arnold was like everyone else.”