Torch Song

By Harvey Fierstein

The revival of Harvey Fierstein’s 1983 Tony Award-winning Best Play

In Torch Song—the two-act revival of Harvey Fierstein’s award-winning Torch Song Trilogy—the life of Arnold Beckoff, a torch-song-singing, Jewish drag queen living in New York City, is dramatized over the span of the late 1970s and 1980s. Told with a likable, human voice, Torch Song follows Arnold’s odyssey to find happiness in New York. All he wants is a husband, a child and a pair of bunny slippers that fit, but a visit from his overbearing mother reminds him that he needs one thing more: respect.

I love this play.

To be more specific, I love this trilogy of plays collected in 1982.

To be even more specific, I love this 2017 single-evening redux of that 1982 trilogy of plays.

The playwright, the great Harvey Fierstein (who you’ll remember as Edna Turnblad from the original Broadway Hairspray) premiered the first of these plays, The International Stud, in 1978 and also – very endearingly – played Arnold. Over the following years (and ultimately decades) he continued to write, premiere, perform and edit this story and these six characters into their present form.

The structure of the resulting evening is especially unique, with each of the three parts written in its own distinct theatrical style, ranging from experimental abstraction to stage sitcom – with the warmth and humanity of these deeply relatable characters as the continuity.

The very existence of a ‘gay play’ centered on family, on parents and children, on home life and on love was downright revolutionary in the early 1980s, and its authentic, sharp and hilarious mixture of Jewish and queer cultures, family drama and laugh-out-loud comedy still speaks to us today.

Welcome. Settle in. Enjoy.

Chase Brock, Director

Jerry Goehring       ............... Executive Director for Performing Arts

Leo Carusone        ............... Director of Theatre

Justin Zenchuk      ............... Director of Performing Arts Recruitment & Production

Chris D'Amato       ............... Director of Production

Frank Veres           ............... Technical Director

Erin Marcel            ............... Asst. Director of Performing Arts Operations

Mark Williams        ............... Asst. Director of Production, Digital Technology

Allegra Pin             ............... Asst. Director of Performing Arts Recruitment & Production

Christopher Devlin ............... Graduate Asst. for Theatre Arts