Fabian and I went to see Torch Song on Broadway Thanksgiving night Thursday 22 November 2018 at the Hayes Theatre. The play is 3 hour adaptation of the Torch Song Trilogy, which was a series of plays telling a gay life story in New York from 1970-1980. I am reviewing the narrative here and describing the social context.
The present and future significance of the play is in being an artifact of history in the process of fading from living memory. The writer and original lead actor in the play, Harvey Fierstein, has become a hero and relic of the United States gay community for being a successful playwright, and actor, and for being an outspoken public figure, and for being still alive through the AIDS crisis. I want to clarify that I do not mean to qualify his accomplishments by noting him as a survivor of the AIDS crisis, but in that sector for that time, many gay artists did not survive. It is unusual that he was a successful artist producing gay art before HIV, then he survived, and now he is around to adapt his plays for the contemporary audience and posterity. Some gay artists came to prominence during the AIDS crisis, but this play was different and unusual because it was popular and gay themed before the other artists died, and before the greatly increased attention on gay issues which the AIDS crisis brought.
The storyline of the play takes place in about 1970 and ends in about 1980, and definitely before anyone had ever heard of AIDS. The play was first performed in 1982. AIDS became a thing in 1981, and although I cannot place it on a timeline against the release of this play, it is certain that Fierstein wrote and planned the performance of the play outside of an awareness of HIV. It is an oddity for being a gay male play in the time of AIDS but which speaks nothing to HIV. Shortly after the release of this play, nearly all gay art, gay writing, or anything else related to gay life till about 2000 would feature the theme of HIV/AIDS. Maybe it was around 2005 when about half of gay male oriented works talked about HIV/AIDS, and the rest could talk about other issues. Seeing this play now is a surprise because it shows the culture of gay life before HIV/AIDS. Of course all the issues in this play existed after HIV.
On any night in New York City there is the option to go to about 100 plays which are easy to find. This excludes plays which get advertised in their own neighborhood but which are smaller productions not competing in the city as a whole. Of the ones broadly advertised, maybe 20% have Jewish themes and 20% have gay male themes. When I moved to NYC in 2012 I knew there was a gay culture and I knew there was a Jewish culture, but how these things express themselves was a surprise to me. It was also a surprise to me that the context of this is always NYC’s unique culture. Theatre continuously deconstructs gay culture and Jewish culture then reconstructs the parts into stage narratives. The depictions are realistic, but it is a formulaic repetition where the play shows, “Look at the shock of being a gay male” or “Look at the shock of being a Jew”. Torch Song is about a gay Jew. Harvey Fierstein is a gay Jew. This is fine, and I have come to understand more about what it means to be gay or Jewish in New York because NYC is a media center and gay guys and Jews love media output. What is more odd about this is the overrepresentation in media. If anyone from the future looks back, they might misunderstand that what happens in plays was representative of the era, or of gay guys, or the place of Jews in society, or that somehow the gay experience in most of the world from 1960-2000 was as urban as NYC and involved Jews. This is not the case.
I did find Torch Song to be relatable though. At least this play exists, because we have no contemporary access to other gay male perspectives from this era. Were it not for NYC’s wealth and media power, and were it not for the Jews setting the precedent of being a fringe culture in NYC to make way for all sorts of minority groups to present themselves in stage in media, then maybe NYC would not have been as supportive for gay playrights to put themselves out there, publish, perform, and be archived.
As a condensed trilogy the play had three parts. The first part from the first play is about the main character, Arnold, is a 1970 drag performer who in his off time relaxes in a gay bar called International Male. He talks about his love life and wanting a steady boyfriend. He meets a bi guy, Ed, and speculates on whether he should date him despite the problems that go along with that. He does, and then gets tense over Ed having a girlfriend. The second part from the second play, Fugue in a Nursery, takes place years later at Ed’s farmhouse in upstate New York. At this point Ed and Arnold are separated for some years. Ed is living with his girlfriend and they invite Arnold to stay with them for a while. Arnold brings his new boyfriend, Allen, with him to visit. The girl is unusually liberal about everything, encouraging Ed to sex around with the guys if he likes, and this part of the play explores what kind of relationship Ed and Arnold wish to have with each other. The third part from the third play, Widows and Children First, takes place in 1980. Allen has died from being gay bashed one year before the start of the play after he and Arnold have been together for about 5 years. 6 months ago, Arnold has adopted a 15 year old gay boy. Ed is far along but not complete with the process of separating from his girlfriend. The play is on a day when Ed is visiting Arnold’s apartment and Arnold’s Jewish mother is visiting. In the visit she learns about her son’s life – that he is still seeing Ed after 10 years, and that gay guys experience homophobic violence, and that teenage guys have a sexuality and require community support in a dangerous world.
The Arnold character is on stage in conversation for almost the entire play. The play is heavy on dialogue and near monologue. Fabian suggested that we go to the play because we are both interested in gay history, plus he got an invite from his colleague Jesse who was managing the hair department for the show, plus also he worked with the actor playing Arnold, Michael Urie, when they were in a television show together.
The play has some light points but without a lot of talking the show sets up tension among everyone. All the characters are made vulnerable, all of them seek to resolve conflict with the others by proposing compromises and saying what they want, and the pacing of the play communicates that a happy relationship will include years of deep conversation among people who are very close to each other. Even years of continual deep discussion is not long enough for two people to understand each other, even if they come from very similar and very intimate backgrounds, and even if they are well spoken and frank with each other. The characters are all deeply sensitive and realistically talk with each other, and they reference experiences and social context that demonstrates that they are insiders to the same subcultures, and yet also they have vastly different experiences. Probably the biggest tension in all the discussion is every character being mismatched in a society which prohibits natural behavior. Ed’s tension is that he wants a boyfriend, but at the same time he wants to present himself as straight to his parents and as bi but mostly straight to his girlfriend. That presentation is not a good fit for him, but he goes 10+ years trying to make that work assuming that he eventually will. The Allen character appears at age 20, saying that he did sex work from age 14 and now does modelling, eventually dying at age 25. This character has to negotiate for independence with the other characters who have much more agency than him. Similarly, the David character is a high school kid without parents who mostly wants to go to school. He compares with Allen because presumably with social support Allen would have had a different life, and one would imagine that in adopting him, Arnold must be thinking of his dead partner Allen who was on the streets at David’s age. Arnold’s mother’s objective is to have a conventional life, but always a certain number of people will have a minority lifestyle as her son does. In the time of the play the common ways for families of gay guys to respond where breaking off and negotiating a compromise. She petitions Arnold for more compromise, and Arnold counters to seek less compromise.
In the future I am not sure that this play will speak to people like it spoke to me. There are dated actions in the play, such as interacting with the telephone. The Arnold character has to wait by a phone for a call, which is not something that future generations will remember. If anyone in the future understands this then they will not have an emotional reaction to it. In another scene Arnold is on the phone and David jumps onto the line from another room. This cannot happen anymore – no one spontaneously jumps into a mobile phone conversation in the way that everyone in the house had to share a phone line in the pre-digital age. Arnold says that he wants National Geographic magazines in play 2 and in play 3, they are subtly on the set. Future generations will not recognize the yellow magazine binding. Arnold has sex in the bar without a condom. I am not sure what future generations will think of that, but to contemporary eyes, to so lightly disregard safe sex means something whereas in the play’s time it meant nothing at all because there were no condoms for gay sex before HIV. The story describes underage teenage prostitution, which was more common the generation before mine, was common in my generation, but which became much less common with the advent of the Internet. While youth virtual sex work is a lot more common now just because it is possible now but was impossible before technology, I perceive major changes in public sentiment about actual physical intercourse teenage sex work. Before there was a lot of sentiment that sex work was just part of society, and nowadays it would be shocking to portray a 15-year old doing street prostitution and being open, casual, and cool about it in mixed company. I also reflected on issues not covered in the play like Catholic sex abuse. A perspective on youth sex work which got lost in the transition to Internet was that when people try to understand the church abuse nowadays, they wonder how authority figures kept the secret. The answer was that they did not need to exactly, because their sex was not the taboo. The taboo and the target of blame was the younger person. I think audiences now would see the sex worker and think the problem is mostly the clients who would seek them. At the time of the play, that sentiment was not there, because groups like churches would fault the sex workers not the clients. In the play Arnold says that he could not afford living in Brooklyn so he got a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I have no idea how to parse any understanding out of that. So I understand there was a time when minimum wage was enough to live comfortably in Manhattan. Even I lived comfortably on maybe 25% of minimum wage in Seattle in most of the 2000s, but those days are gone. The experience of work versus income is radically different in different places. For an arts scene to flourish, so far as I know, cost of living has to be low and opportunities for artists to work have to be high, and I guess in 1970s NYC some drag performers lived that way. Ed’s relationship with his girlfriend was unusual and I am not sure how realistic it was, or how liberal a girl could be. From 1983 or so no girl would have that – HIV was too prevalent. Bringing in a 55+ year old Jewish woman into a NYC gay male drama was an ending that would make sense to no one except anyone who knows NYC, but this is how the play ended. A conservative Jewish mother comes into a relationship with 3 gay men to examine its interconnection. Unlike the Christian culture which is more familiar to me and less tolerant to Christianity, the Jewish mother in the play has no particular reaction to gay culture. Jews can be ignorant of things like gay male culture but they are still worldly and ready to understand anything to its fundamental nature, and she has conversation in that context.
Good luck to the historian who looks back on this play. What a weird snapshot of a time period which briefly existed.
Fabian and I went backstage at the show because he knew people there. I saw something that makes sense but I never thought about it. At the end of plays the actors come to the stage together to receive applause. In some plays that are more slice of life like this one, the actors change out of their costumes, which in this case were period street clothes, and change into their contemporary street clothes. I have seen this before. Doing this communicates that the actors are just typical people in our communities. Here was was thing with this play – the characters in the play were trendy, and when the actors came out at the end, they were trendy too which makes sense for cool Broadway people. But backstage I saw all the actors taking off the clothes that they only wore for the applause, and they changed into less fashionable real life clothes. So the situation was that for the final applause the actors were playing cool New Yorkers, but actually to receive the applause they were playing yet other characters who are still not who they actually are. They have another life and just put on fake normal day clothes for the end of the show, and those clothes do not match what theatre-goers want to imagine that actors look like off-stage.
Also, one of the characters is a boy in his underwear for the whole play. All the actors have their costumes all packaged up. There are washing machines in the back to wash everything after every show. For this guy he just has a pair of underwear. I do not know what I was expecting. Maybe I thought he just wore his clothes to the theatre and took off his pants and shirt to act every night, and just performed in whatever underwear he was wearing. What happened actually is that the costume designer apparently designated a costume for him like anyone else’s, and he changes into it and changes out of it every night. So he comes in his real street clothes, changes into underwear, performs, changes into fake street clothes to receive applause, then leaves his fake underwear and fake street clothes behind to change into real underwear and real street clothes.