Courtesy of Off-Off-Broadway’s Black Henna Productions, Harvey Fierstein’s Tony-winning play Torch Song Trilogy is running in Manhattan for the first time since its Broadway mounting ended in 1985. Playing Arnold Beckoff—a Jewish drag queen in the pre-AIDS New York City of the late 1970s and early ’80s—transformed Fierstein from a downtown doyen into the gravel-voiced monarch of gaydom. For actor Cas Marino, who plays Arnold in this revival, the experience is about fate and big balls.
“For years,” Marino explains, “the subject of Torch Song cropped up whenever directors worked with me. Like it loomed in the ether, except no one had the balls to actually go into preproduction with it.”
Enter the metaphorical scrotum of Malini Singh McDonald, the straight, married woman directing this revival. She and Marino are longtime friends, and one day, she says, “I told Cas, ‘Let’s just sit down and read it.’ ” Beginning with the middle play, Fugue in a Nursery—The International Stud is first and Widows and Children First! is third—they finished five hours later.
“So our future crystallized,” McDonald says. “Obviously Torch Song’s time has come again. We had to produce it.” Rights were obtained, casting sessions held (McDonald’s actor-husband, Ian McDonald, is playing one of Arnold’s love interests) and a question emerged: Is Torch Song a period piece?
Yes and no, Marino asserts. “Yes, in that before Arnold takes it up the ass in a back room, condoms and HIV status are never mentioned. Now that would be second nature. I mean, ‘You’re clean, right?’ is what you’d ask then—fags didn’t need condoms because it was, ‘Well, you’re not getting me pregnant.’ Yet there are conversations in the play that Arnold has with his mother—the same conversations at least three-quarters of gay men are still having with their mothers today.”
Marino holds his memory of the original Torch Song dear. “As a straight-identifying teenager then, a straight man came to me with the script—he’d seen the play with his parents and he handed me the script and said, ‘This is the most fucking brilliant thing I’ve ever seen and it will change your life.’ I don’t think he knew that after a 10-year experiment with heterosexuality, just how much change there would be. It was first time a gay character held his head held up high and said, ‘I am who I am and if you don’t like it, it’s not my problem, it’s yours.’ It was the first time he wasn’t the buffoon, the frou-frou interior decorator next door. Arnold is human first and homosexual second. That is what set the gays and straights on their ears.”
Black Henna is presenting the plays individually on weeknights and in their entirety this weekend. American Theatre of Actors’ Sargent Theatre, 314 W. 54th St. (betw. 8th & 9th Aves.), 646-537-1733; times vary, $35-75.
Cas Marino as Arnold Beckoff who doubles as Virginia Hamm / Photo by Rob Zukowski
