Friday, October 20, 2017
How Do You Revitalize a Historic Gay Play?
Theatre Development Fund – TDF: Sometimes great theatre minds think alike. That's what happened when director Moisés Kaufman and playwright Harvey Fierstein each reached out independently to Michael Urie about playing Arnold Beckoff, an adorably neurotic Jewish drag queen looking for love, in separate readings of Torch Song Trilogy. "I had been following Michael's work and I loved it so much," recalls Kaufman. "So I called him and said, 'Let's sit around my living room and read the play.'
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2 comments:
I would really love to see a play like this. I ultimately love the message of the show, that "it's a play in which a man imagines a world in which he can live the way he wants -- a way that everyone is telling him is not possible" and how the director thinks that's not only applicable to this specific character and the struggle for the LGBTQ community but for everyone struggling to fit in and be themselves in a restrictive world. It's really interesting to know that this play was written in the seventies and predicts the rise in gay marriage and acceptance from families. It is interesting to read through the process the directors went through to decide on this show, collaborate, and choose the main actor. I am curious if there are any other historical gay plays and if so when can we start seeing more of those?
As a queer person, going to watch queer theatre is pretty much always emotionally exhausting. I have to ramp myself up and quash my anxiety down to go see another play about the "agony and trials of being a queer person in a heterosexual world" where the queer people being depicted are nearly always male and cis and barely exist outside of easily identified stereotypes that a straight audience can understand. Torch Song is incredibly relevant in queer theatre history as a seminal work just as the gay rights movement was beginning to hit its fever pitch, and I do appreciate the effort to have such a play continue to resonate with audiences today. However, at this point in history, when we simultaneously have same sex marriage while being denied service by government workers, when trans women of color are being murdered for existing while the world at large is beginning to acknowledge a gender revolution, and when we have queer representation in almost every form of media while the president jokes about how his vice president wants to "hang us all" at a press conference, I'd like to see more plays explored that are relevant to what is actually happening now. We are in uncharted, paradoxical, and ever-shifting territory that is not depicted in the plays of the past and we need art about that.
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