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I am a straight theatergoer.
I willingly, even passionately, surrender my laughter, my tears, my sympathy, my solidarity—and most personal of all, my money—to a "gay play."
That is just so ... unremarkable. 'Bout a seven on the International Yawn Index. Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
You interrupted Carson ridiculing a disheveled slug in a grease-smeared "Carpenters Do It With Real Wood" T-shirt to tell me THAT?
Yes. Because that unremarkableness, strained through a 35-year-old prism of rancorous sexual politics that refracts images from Stonewall to DeGeneres, is remarkable, given the extraordinary Duh! power of hindsight.
Stonewall was gay rights' most militant milestone, Ellen its noisiest pop-cultural benchmark. But Torch Song Trilogy, Harvey Fierstein's hilariously heartrending dissection of a middle-aged homosexual's quest for inner peace, outer acceptance and even a measure of familial nesting, is one of its most propulsive artistic advances, a vivid expression of humor, pain and love that touched gay and straight audiences alike—and en masse for the first time.
It was conceived as three one-act plays—The International Stud (named for a notorious Gotham gay bar), Fugue in a Nursery and Widows and Children First!—when the first chapter bowed and wowed off-off-Broadway in 1978. By 1982, it was one three-act piece, combined for a long play's journey into night on Broadway.
Running three years on theater's main drag, it netted Fierstein a Best Play Tony as author and Best Actor statuette for his starring role as Arnold Beckoff, a witty and kind female impersonator from Brooklyn (first glimpsed in robe and bunny slippers). A 1988 film followed, co-starring Matthew Broderick as schoolteacher Ed, Arnold's confused bisexual lover, and Anne Bancroft as disapproving Mama Beckoff. (The stage role shot Estelle Getty to Sophiadom on The Golden Girls.)
The New York Post observed that, "under the tragedy, the play is gorgeously funny," and Newsweek's critic called it, "a very funny, poignant and unabashedly entertaining work that, so help me, is something for the whole family."
Set in the '70s, The International Stud— staged minus its follow-up acts the next two weekends as Las Vegas Little Theatre's late-night Insomniac Project—takes us inside New York's backroom gay bars for some pre-AIDS promiscuity as Arnold and Ed meet. In Fugue, Ed abandons Arnold for his girlfriend, Laurel, triggering complications when Arnold introduces his new boyfriend, strapping, young model Alan. Widows circles parenthood at both ends as Arnold reconciles with Ed, copes with potential adopted gay son David, a teen street hustler, and his own judgmental mom.
(If Stud proves successful, an LVLT staffer says the theater likely will stage Fugue and Widows next year.)
By play's end, Arnold is carving a surrogate clan out of a society set on denying him the blessings of family.
Nearly 25 years, defiant mayors, a proposed constitutional amendment, civil-union debates, Massachusetts legislators, San Francisco renegades and Rosie's wedded bliss later, ain't that a kick in the hetero marriage bed?
LVLT's decision to stage Stud minus its companion pieces risks sacrificing the perspective the combined work could offer contemporary audiences, given its renewed relevance amid the gay marriage controversy. But logistically, the choice is understandable. Even if mounted as a main-stage production, the full brio of the trio takes three-plus hours to unfold, requiring extensive patience, stillness and focus—a lot to ask of both Broadway loyalists and regional theatergoers.
But staged solo, Stud could reveal itself as a sad time capsule, rendered socially irrelevant, even irresponsible, by hindsight. Authored before AIDS ripped through the gay community and steamrolled over medical myths and homophobia to assault the population at large—and scaring condoms onto the straight world—it's a peekaboo into a scene of anonymous, unsafe, backroom couplings with multiple partners that the disease would brutally demolish. And, as AIDS metastasized into a worldwide scourge, that "cruising" element of the gay subculture was pounced upon by gay bashers wielding it to demonize what they labeled decadent and immoral behavior, warranting, in their ugly estimation, God's smiteful punishment.
Watching Stud may feel like flashing back to those final, innocent moments just before the world was blindsided. An imminent global train wreck witnessed from the lead car right at that awful moment of impact. However, given that history inevitably repeats itself because we repeatedly forget it once pain lessens and time passes—and with new generations of medication allowing AIDS sufferers to live longer, less miserable lives—its validity as a cautionary tale might still stand.
But tackling Trilogy in its entirety right now, in these politically electric times, would be a worthwhile risk for human, if not box-office benefits. Granted, that's an enormous leap of faith—hell, a sacrifice—in Las Vegas, where audiences are relatively scarce for any form of non-Cirque/Celine-less theater. A massive running time, regardless of twin intermissions, discourages even the faithful, and recent polls reaffirm Nevada as George Bush territory (surprise!), with presumptive Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry facing daunting odds against capturing our five electoral votes come November.
But where art is an engine for social change—and it has no nobler purpose, what its entertainment, intellectual and even offensive (to some) properties should ideally amount to—a missed opportunity is inexcusable.
It isn't that local theater has fled from homosexual topics: The Center Stage, a gay-themed company, wrestled with it last season by producing Twilight of the Golds (a couple struggles over whether to abort a child determined by a still-unproven genetics test to likely be born gay). We've also recently experienced Nevada Theatre Company's Hedwig and the Angry Inch (a botched transsexual's—hence the ouch! of a title—flamboyant confessions, a direct Trilogy-inspired descendent, plus gay elements threaded throughout LVLT's Bash (a murderous hate crime against a gay man), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Brick's suppressed, hinted-at love for a childhood chum) and The Lion in Winter (the gay predilections of Richard the Lionheart), as well as UNLV's Six Degrees of Separation (a black, gay street hustler upsetting the world of a rich, white couple).
But Trilogy is as potent—and timely—an argument for gay marriage as any advocate could muster, as much a play for our time today as it was yesterday.
In its funny and achingly relatable depiction of Arnold as someone as buffeted by the fickle winds of love and complex tangle of human relations as the rest of us, Trilogy reveals a man who, despite his "alternative" sexual preference, seeks only a modest slice of domestic happiness: a loving partner, a salvageable relationship with his mother, a potentially nurturing one with his adopted son. A family as dysfunctional, but fulfilling, as any in America. Warm and moving, Fierstein's Arnold emerges—despite society's attempts to marginalize and dismiss him as nothing more than an aging drag queen, denied the basic human yearning for domesticity—as one of theater's most universal characters.
Says critic Gibson Fay-LeBlanc: "His refusal to hide from the pain of his struggles with his family, loved ones and loss makes him as tragic and heroic a figure as any. He deserves a place next to Willy Loman in the history of American drama."
Fierstein's soul-baring opus was the first to so unapologetically place a gay man's emotional agenda in the theatrical spotlight. Homosexuality has long been explored on stage and the page, dating back to Plato's examination of homoerotic love in Phaedrus in 388 B.C., or Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891, which scandalized the Brits.
In more contemporary pre-Trilogy times—say the 1960s—works such as Matt Crowley's 1968 play, The Boys in the Band were more whispered taboos than subjects for open discussion among mainstream audiences. By1979, Martin Sherman's play Bent stepped more comfortably into the limelight, but its setting in a Nazi death camp—though riveting, as two gay prisoners attempt to express their love without ever being allowed to touch—let us distance ourselves from gay issues in our own time and place.
With high heels raised, Torch Song Trilogy kicked in the door through which followed, among others: The Normal Heart, As Is, Love! Valour! Compassion!, M. Butterfly and Angels in America, plus, only last year, David Mamet's lesbian-themed Boston Marriage. Tons more less-heralded works on stage and screen have marched through too, not to mention lighthearted crowd-pleasers such as La Cage Aux Folles (book by Fierstein) and its movie incarnation, The Birdcage; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; and the Vegas-centric camp-fest, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.
In an ironic footnote, when Trilogy hit Broadway, some gays slammed it for framing gay life in a scenario so associated with the ways of straights—a domestic, traditionally heterosexual model of contentment—rather than celebrating the uniqueness of the gay culture of the time.
That is still ironic, but no longer a footnote. AIDS altered gay life, and more enlightened thinking—though nowhere near genuinely "enlightened"—has at least delivered us into a serious debate, and even legal challenges, over the right for committed gay couples to marry.
Torch Song Trilogy was ahead of its time, and time has finally caught up. Beyond political opportunism, this is a moral imperative. For however many minds it might change, or hearts it might touch:
Someone. Anyone. Stage Torch Song Trilogy.
All of it.
Now.