Mercedes Ruehl and Micharel Urie
Photo: Joan Marcus
Torch Song by
Harvey Fierstein is making a sentimental if not quite a sensational return to its Off-Broadway roots. This time
uptown. Originally comprised of three related one-act plays (with their genesis
more notably downtown than midtown), it became a hit in 1982 at the Little
Theatre a small Broadway house where it continued a long and successful life under
the umbrella title Torch Song Trilogy. In
its original run Fierstein play the principal role of the drag queen Arnold. Unloading the Trilogy from the title and compressing the three parts into two doesn’t
really remove the feeling, in the current production under the direction of
Moises Kaufman at the Second Stage, that the play’s three parts, however
compellingly presented, are distinctively different in tone, temperament and style.
Trimmed of its original combined length of nearly four hours
to a little more than two and one half hours, the play remains a complex comedy-drama
about a young man’s search for love and to be a part of a respected family unit
and despite living as a homosexual on the fringe of normalcy. This theme is
explored with an extravagance that is both exhilarating and enervating at the
same time. It is the story of Arnold Beckoff, a drag-queen whose on-again
off-again affair with a bi-sexual married lover becomes complicated when he becomes
a foster parent for a gay teenage boy. This, to the chagrin of his Jewish
mother whose unsettling visit becomes unexpectedly therapeutic.
That’s it in a nutshell, except that that nutshell is filled
to overflowing with breathless and sometimes breathtaking monologues and some
brutal confrontations that appear as both surreal and also quite ordinary. If the
plot that covers more territory and more traumas than it can comfortably accommodate,
it remains an emotional hodgepodge, an intensely personal story without the wider
and perhaps wiser inclusion of social and political issues that Tony Kushner explored
in his gay-centric trilogy Angels in America.
In the first play International
Stud, Arnold, as flamboyantly played by the always astonishing Michael
Urie, has the stage virtually to himself both in and out of drag. In a motor-mouthed
monologue, Arnold shares with us his promiscuousness in his search for the
right man in gay bars. This was 1974 before the awareness and the impact of AIDS
s would curtail anonymous backroom sex. In such a bar where Arnold’s timidity (funny
considering his profession) is funnily addressed with a semi-graphic encounter,
Arnold has already met good-looking bi-sexual teacher Ed (fine performance by Ward
Horton) destined to be his semi-partner in life.
A few years later in the more surreally imagined Fugue in a Nursery, Ed is comfortably married
to attractive Laurel (nice impact by Roxanna Hope Radia) and has no qualms about
inviting Ed’s ex lover to their summer home for a weekend in the country, especially
now that Arnold has a new very handsome young lover Alan (very fine Michael Rosen.)
Alan, however, finds it hard to resist the moves made on him by Ed. Various
hanky panky and heart-to-hearts are played out by the couples on a very large
bed.
The final act is Widows
and Children First and takes place five years later in which a tragedy
brings Ed to Arnold’s side but also to help him cope with the raising of 15
year-old David (Jack DiFalco.) Both seem to be involved in seeing that the very
bright lad gets a high school education. What puzzles me is how the foster
parents organization feels about or considers Arnold’s profession....or is Arnold
pursuing another career that is not revealed?
What we do know very quickly is how Arnold’s mother (Mercedes
Ruehl) feels about him and his life-style when she arrives for a visit. The acting
by all during this final play is close to farcical as it takes place in Arnold’s
apartment. Ruehl’s amusing, if also audience pandering, performance as a stereotypical
Jewish mother can be most easily defined as sit-com reality. Cutting one-liners
fly through the air as breezily as do the acrid recriminations and searing regrets.
. .all neatly attached to the play’s over-the-top layer of sentimentality.
We have to surmise that director Kaufman (“The Heiress” with
Jessica Chastain) knows exactly what he wanted to do with these three conjoined
plays whose distinct personalities will forever be in conflict. This is typified
by scenic designer David Zinn’s three functional purposefully incompatible settings.
Perhaps the key to unlocking the play is revealed through the character of Ed who, like Jennie in Lady in the Dark, just can’t make up his mind. Maybe that just doesn’t
matter so much anymore in the light of our evolving and devolving obsession
with modern sexuality. Thirty five years later, Fierstein’s Torch Song is still touching but also a
bit tired. Simon Saltzman
Torch Song (limited
run) at Second Stage Theater, Tony Kiser Theater (212) 246 4422
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