First, the sweet-natured yenta: “Ask me anything!” he says in a whiskey baritone pitched at the rasp in which most people snore (his real voice). For the first few minutes, he’s elusive, shape shifting from one camp persona to the other. One might even call Trilogy a morality tale: the drag queen becomes a symbol for the frightened masquerader hiding behind a “phony name, face, figure, and sex.” As Arnold sheds his mask, he forsakes self-involvement to embrace the large world and become what one reviewer called “the oddest solid citizen in the republic.”Ī recent meeting with Fierstein in his dressing room at the Little Theatre replays this disguise-shedding motif. What he wants, we discover, is the stuff of ordinary human happiness-the life his mother had “with a few minor alterations”-home, “husband,” and a child. While this premise may seem daring for Broadway, Arnold turns out to be a staunch conservative at heart.
Rather than renounce his campy flamboyance for Broadway’s straighter milieu, he took it with him in Trilogy, which opens as Arnold, a promiscuous drag queen, sets out in search of his ideal man.
He also did a club act impersonating Ethel Merman singing “You Can’t Get a Man With a Gun.” Other roles have included a transvestite in his own Flatbush Tosca (“I sang the whole second act in Italian,” he says), and a 300-year-old woman, Lillian Russell, and 26 other parts in Ronald Tavel’s My Fetus Lived on Amboy Street. Rather than starting his acting career the usual way-as a spear carrier, for instance, in a stock production of Shakespeare-he began professional work as an “asthmatic dyke” in Andy Warhol’s play, Pork. Still, he’s been praised by critics and theatergoers alike, making him just one anomaly of what is already a “wondrous strange” hit for Broadway.Īnother is the 28-year-old playwright-star, Harvey Fierstein. Though a drag queen is often prized for his femininity, drag queen Arnold Beckoff, the main character of Torch Song Trilogy, is less the “little flower” than the Amazon not “pretty” beautiful but “mountain” beautiful as another character says. In honor of the show's anniversary and the recent, Tony-nominated revival starring Michael Urie, Playbill looks back on this in-depth interview with Fierstein-before he was the theatrical icon he is today. While Fierstein had been writing his own work and performing his drag club act around the Village, Trilogy put him on the map. On June 10, 1982, Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy opened on Broadway. Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear.
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