LOVE ‘SONG’ LIVES AGAIN
Fierstein’s AIDS-era classic hits home
For some younger audience members inside the Helen Hayes Theatre, Harvey Fierstein's “Torch Song” must seem like a weird relic from another time — a 1982 experience, meaning a trip back to when you couldn't trust your lover to trust himself to be gay or your own mother to accept you, as you.
Not that every mother is now more understanding, nor is every closet door flung open in pride. Still, to watch “Torch Song” is to marvel at how far we have together come. The piece — originally the fourhour “Torch Song Trilogy” but now cut back to three and staged on a retro-cool, neoncrusted setting from David Zinn — was written only three years before Larry Kramer eviscerated everyone from Ed Koch to the bathhouse owners to The New York Times in the seminal AIDS drama, “The Normal Heart.”
Gay New York City changed and suffered a lot in those three years. But there is little anger beyond personal frustration in “Torch Song” — just love looking for the home it deserves. On Broadway, the heart always has sold the most tickets and this show has all the right feels.
Our hero is Arnold Beckoff, a drag queen who plied his trade long before RuPaul made racy rouge cool. Arnold, played by Michael Urie, has to deal with a less remunerative and seedier profession, not to mention anonymous, soul-destroying sex in back rooms — an activity that, subsequent history revealed, offered neither safety nor balm for the soul.
Underappreciated for years, Urie is a fantastic physical actor — an atypically precise and detailed master farceur as adept at physical shtick as at making you care about his eminently lovable character. Arnold is not unlike the title character in “Sweet Charity” or Charlotte York in “Sex and the City.” Everything that he wants, Fierstein ensures, he richly deserves and it's hard to imagine a bettercast actor than Urie, a vulnerable, in-the-moment kind of personality who sits atop this show and makes you love him for the whole three hours.
In the first act of the show, Urie dominates as he should, especially during his hilarious enactment of being on the receiving end of semi-anonymous sex, an experience that Urie interprets in every color of the rainbow. The second part of the trilogy, a fugue famously set in a huge bed filled with Arnold, his ex-lover Ed (Ward Horton), Ed's lover Laurel (Roxanna Hope Radja) and Arnold's current squeeze Alan (Michael Hsu Rosen) works fine, but is nothing special, mostly because it doesn't feel like anyone except Arnold is taking a real risk.
The money scene, of course, comes after intermission, when Mercedes Ruehl shows up as Arnold's Jewish dowager of a mom. The key here, which director Moises Kaufman fully understands, is that Mrs. Beckoff is trapped in a paradox: Even though she loves her son with every fiber of her being, she cannot change her own homophobia enough to love him as he rightly demands to be loved.
Arnold knows all of this but still cannot stop loving his mom right back. The scene is the best writing of Fierstein's distinguished career and it's performed here to near perfection.
By then Arnold and Ed (he's back) have adopted a gay teenager, David. He's played by the miscast Jack DiFalco, who does not come off even remotely as a teenager, meaning that the production misses the chance fully to make one of the most powerful statements implicit to “Torch Song”: that gay Americans deserve the right to parent. But even this unfathomably bizarre choice does not change the play's poignancy nor its assertive case for its own importance as a beautiful record of a complicated moment, just before the fullest ravages of AIDS.
Kaufman clearly gets the most important point made in this work: homophobia and its legacy of selfloathing were the underlying causes of why so many died, and so many looked away. But love lived on.