In act two, Fugue in a Nursery (1978), Ed and his by-now wife Laurel invite Arnold up to their house in the country for a weekend of (it turns out) comparison, relentless self-analysis, and lots of hugging to Ed’s chagrin, Arnold brings along his new boyfriend, an 18-year-old hustler turned fashion model named Alan. But he’s not ready for the commitment Arnold craves, and soon has ditched Arnold for the safer (he thinks) confines of heterosexual courtship, while Arnold experiments with and rejects the anonymous lustfulness of the backroom sex bars. Ed is a confused, insensitive closet case who also, if he could only get past his hang-ups, is a pretty nice guy and in love with Arnold. The very fragile core of this family is Arnold, a professional female impersonator (but not a drag queen in his offstage life), and Ed, the bisexual Arnold meets at a gay cruise bar called the International Stud (Fierstein’s mockery of the tough-guy bars that dot the west side of Greenwich Village). By the time the plays made it to Broadway under one title (and with some material cut, though it is restored here), the work had taken shape as the story of the coming of age not just of Arnold but of a small group of people–an extended family drawn together partly by coincidence and partly by circumstances.
That 1977-1983 time frame is more than just a playwright’s device it’s the time period in which Harvey Fierstein, the play’s author and original star, developed Torch Song as a series of three one-acts. By 1983, when the evening concludes, Arnold is adopting a 15-year-old boy–and is just on the verge of growing up himself. Arnold, the play’s hero, is just 24 in 1977, when the play begins–a streetwise gay guy who’s been around and knows the ropes but still yearns for the “international stud” of his dreams. And (with one exception) they are all young–very young, younger than they know.
Yeats’s phrase, “the young in one another’s arms.” The people in Torch Song spend an awful lot of time embracing–not just making love, but talking, comforting, sharing joy and soothing sorrow, most of which they have caused each other. Watching Torch Song Trilogy at Reflections Theatre last week, I was reminded of W.B. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Line-Up Announced > Close
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