In the first part, the two men meet -to a counterpoint of torch songs, sung pensively by Diane Tarleton - and after a sequence of onagain, off-again encounters, many of them humorous, they separate. The evening studies self-love and self-hate, headstrong passion and heartfelt compassion. For example, Arnold's lover (Joel Crothers) is a bisexual who is caught between two magnets: what he thinks he needs and what he feels. But the cumulative event is one to be experienced and savored.Īmong other things, it deals fairly - without any attempt at exploiting the situation or manipulating our emotions - with varieties of sexual orientation. The author is so accomplished at playing Arthur that he cannot resist an extra flourish or an easy wisecrack, and the ending is too neatly symbolic. Fierstein's performance as well as in the text. There are still flashes of sentimentality in Mr. Instead of reiterating positions, Arnold's story becomes richer as it unfolds. The current evening, running more than four hours, is designed as a trilogy of related plays, but it turns out to be one cohesive three-act play.Įach succeeding ''act'' adds to our understanding and fully justifies what has gone before. He is a man of principle who compulsively plays the fool.Īs presented by the Glines company at the Richard Allen Center, ''The International Stud'' becomes the first chapter in a cycle of tales about Arnold, each originally produced at La Mama. Seeing the play again, in a carefully abridged version in a vastly superior staging by Peter Pope, I found myself enjoying Arnold's wit - he has the pithy humor of a Fran Lebowitz - at the same time that I was moved by his dilemma. At the time, I felt it was a sincere but sentimentalized view of a transvestite in extremis. We first met Arnold in ''The International Stud,'' produced Off Broadway in 1978. Fierstein, who, with his throaty Tallulah voice and manner, stars in his own touching triptych. The evening is a double tour de force for Mr. Fierstein's work, three plays that give us a progressively dramatic and illuminating portrait of a man who laughs, and makes us laugh, to keep from collapsing. Those alterations - Arnold is a homosexual and a professional ''drag queen'' - are the substance but not the sum of Mr.

At the end of a long, infinitely rewarding evening in the company of Arnold and his family and friends, he confesses with a sigh that he has always wanted exactly the life that his mother has had - ''with certain minor alterations.'' Arnold Beckoff, the lonely but far-from-forlorn hero of Harvey Fierstein's ''Torch Song Trilogy,'' is a diehard romantic who takes his heart, soul and fatalism from the 1920's ballads that give the work its title and its tone.

Harvey fierstein torch song trilogy