Harvey Fierstein

Playwright, screenwriter, and actor

• Born: June 6, 1954
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York

Background

Harvey Fierstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a linen manufacturer and a librarian. He got his start in acting at age eleven when he became one of the founding actors in the Gallery Players Community Theater in Brooklyn. In 1973 he graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree from Pratt Institute.

In 1971 Fierstein appeared in Andy Warhol’s play Pork, at La Mama E.T.C. Since then, he has acted in numerous stage productions.

In both his public and private life, Fierstein is a gay rights activist. He has characterized himself as having been the first “real live and out-of-the-closet queer on Broadway.” Homosexuality is the source of much of his comedy as well as the source of much of the tragedy of his drama. In 1998 he spoke at the Matthew Shepard Memorial March and Rally of his emotions at hearing of the student’s death, saying “rage tore through my body nearly shredding my heart.” In his plays and in his public appearances, he has demonstrated his hope that the “struggle for freedom” for the gay and lesbian community may be won.

Achievements

Harvey Fierstein has received numerous awards for his writing and for his acting, both on stage and screen. Between 1976 and 1979, he wrote one of his best-known works, Torch Song Trilogy, which he later adapted for the big screen. The plays were first produced in small theaters. In 1981 Fierstein starred in an Off-Broadway production of the Torch Song Trilogy, which he took to Broadway in 1983. He was the first person to win a Tony Award for both Best Actor and Best Play for the same production. He won two Tony Awards (Best Play and Best Actor) for Torch Song Trilogy. He wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles which premiered on Broadway in 1983 and won the Tony Award for best musical the following year. He narrated the Academy Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk (1984). An outspoken AIDS activist, he performed in a trilogies of plays he penned on the subject, Safe Sex, in 1987. In 1988, he starred in the film adaptation of Torch Song Trilogy, for which he also wrote the screenplay. He had a small, but memorable part as Robin Williams's brother in the popular Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) and played Marty Gilbert in the action thriller Independence Day (1996). His distinctive voice has made him a popular reader of audio books as well as the voice for characters in animated films such as Mulan (1998). Fierstein has had a number of other roles in film and television, but his most notable achievements in his later career have been on the stage.

In 2002 he returned to the stage as a performer, playing Edna Turnblad in the musical adaptation of the John Waters cult film of the same name. The musical was a runaway hit and earned Fierstein a Tony for best performance by a leading actor in a musical at the 2003 awards. In 2004 he took over the lead role of Tevye in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. He wrote the book a musical adaptation of the film Newsies with Alan Menken, who wrote the music, The show premiered in 2012 and Fierstein was nominated for Tony Awards for best book and best musical. Fierstein and recording artist Cyndi Lauper wrote the 2013 musical Kinky Boots, which won a Tony for best musical, among a number of other Tonys and nominations.

Selected Analysis

The feelings experienced by Harvey Fierstein when learning of the death of student Matthew Shepard are expressed in his plays. In his speech at the memorial, he gave voice to a theme that is at the center of his dramatic works: Because politicians and moral leaders—and thus society—assault the “dignity and humanity” of the gay and lesbian community, its members “must take hold of [their] own destinies.” The characters in his plays display their pain, their dignity, and their humanity as they show how capable, or at least how determined, they are to be masters of their own destinies.

Fierstein’s drama is New Wave in its expression of his personal viewpoints and experiences. It is expressionistic in its frequent depiction of experience in a way that distorts reality in order to present psychological truths. It is existential in that it emphasizes the individual’s freedom of choice and the distortion of society’s role in its seeking to inhibit the choice of so many of its constituents.

Torch Song Trilogy

In adapting his three one-act dramas for the screen, Fierstein had to eliminate some of his expressionistic techniques. This is most obvious when in a comparison of the stage and screen versions of Fugue in a Nursery. In the stage version of Fugue in a Nursery, there is little action: Four actors appear in a large bed with light focused on the speaker who reveals unseen aspects of the action or the drama to the audience or on speakers whose conversation carries the essence of the present dramatic moment. In the film, the action and emotional development are presented in linear fashion, and scene changes are frequent. Fierstein has bemoaned the loss of many good jokes in the transfer from stage to screen. However, his writing as well as his acting in both versions of Torch Song Trilogy have been widely appreciated.

The International Stud

The difficulty of being a homosexual in the second half of the twentieth century is poignantly rendered in this first play of the Torch Song Trilogy. Ed Reiss is a boyish-looking thirty-five-year-old man who cannot commit to drag queen Arnold Beckoff, the trilogy’s main character, because he is ashamed to admit that he is gay. The two men, Ed and Arnold, come to care deeply for each other, but Ed stops seeing Arnold and forces himself to spend time only with Laurel, who is not shown in this play but is featured in the second play of the trilogy.

Other evidence of Ed’s ambivalence can be found in his avoidance of Arnold while Ed’s parents are in town. When they leave, he turns once more to Arnold. Fearing the displeasure of his parents and society, Ed tries to conform to the standards they have set, but the denial of his true self is deadly. His return to Arnold is a plea for salvation.

In the final scene of The International Stud, Ed appears in Arnold’s backstage dressing room after an absence of several months. He tells Arnold that he and Laurel are engaged. He also tells him that he has had a dream, which he can discuss with no one but Arnold. In his dream, Ed searches his father’s workroom for a rag and turpentine. He takes the rag soaked in turpentine and a plastic bag to his bed. When Laurel calls, he wakes to find the soaked rag and the bag actually beside him on his pillow.

The grand finale of The International Stud leaves the audience with a heartbreaking image of what society’s impact on its offspring can be. Ed, a young, appealing teacher, has been driven to the point of suicide by the demands placed on him by a society that reviles him. Arnold confesses that he still loves Ed. However, in this context of societal pressure and imposed self-hatred, Arnold’s final question “Is love enough?” rings loudly in the ears and hearts of audience members.

Fugue in a Nursery

Ed has told Arnold that Arnold’s boudoir is the place that has offered him the most comfort in his life. In Fugue in a Nursery, each of the four occupants of a large bed are searching for the comfort of a nursery. Ed, who had found comfort with Arnold, is trying, still, to find comfort in the life that society favors. Laurel, Ed’s fiancée, wants the comfort she hopes that Ed’s seeing Arnold with Alan will bring to her relationship with Ed. Alan wants the comfort he hopes that Arnold’s seeing Ed with Laurel will bring to his relationship with Arnold. Arnold, comfortable with himself and with his relationship with Alan, wants only to return to the comfort of the home that he and Alan have made together. In all of this comfort seeking, of course, there has to be—and is—an added conflict: Ed and Alan create a fleeting partnership of their own. It is this final complication that sets up the framework for the third play of the trilogy.

Widows and Children First!

The crucial need for self-acceptance of The International Stud leads logically to the seeking and vulnerability in Fugue in a Nursery. The final drama of this trilogy presents another variation of the family/nursery theme by tying together the threads of rejection and acceptance. Once more there is familial disapproval, this time onstage as Arnold’s mother pays him a visit. In contrast to this negative image of family, however, Widows and Children First! offers a positive image, that of Arnold as a foster father to a fifteen-year-old boy, David.

David’s new family is warm and loving. Arnold is both loving father and mother to him, and Ed has moved in temporarily (perhaps) as he is newly separated from his wife. They are a happy threesome. Discord arrives with Arnold’s mother, Mrs. Beckoff. The negative and positive family images intertwine when Mrs. Beckoff worries that her son will be a bad role model for his foster son and Arnold informs her that David is gay and that he has been entrusted to Arnold’s care because of the positive role model that Arnold will be. Arnold, a gay man who has a very real sense of his dignity as a human being, is giving to David what he has had to fight so hard for and what Ed is still fighting for: the comfort of self-acceptance.

As Arnold and his mother argue—as she again and again shows her disapproval of what he is—Arnold tells her that it is parents with attitudes like hers who teach their children that it is all right to take baseball bats and beat gay men to death, as someone had done to Alan. Through a comparison of his mother’s and his own loss of partners, Arnold convinces his mother that a loving partnership is every bit as meaningful to gay partners as it is to heterosexual partners. Initially, when Arnold compares his grief at losing Alan to hers on the loss of her husband, Mrs. Beckoff takes it as an insult, but when Arnold demonstrates that he experienced the same loneliness at the breakfast table as she had and the same grief at disposing of the departed’s belongings as she had, she becomes convinced that she has never known enough about her son. She backs down from her disapproving stance, and after giving him a brief motherly lesson in grieving, she leaves.

In their conversations during the play, Arnold tells his mother that he has taught himself to do everything for himself so that he can rely solely on himself. Of any accepted associate, he says, he demands love and respect. He wins, finally, the grudging respect of his mother, and he has already won the love and respect of his foster son. Ed, who is finding comfort in Arnold’s home, is learning to show his ungrudging love and respect for its members.

At the end of the play, the audience is left to imagine that there will be a renewed relationship between Arnold and Ed and to feel almost certain that Arnold’s application for adoption of David will be approved. The play closes on the note of comfort sought in the other plays of the trilogy.

Fierstein’s point is obvious but poignant—both on its own merits and because of its context. The society that has nearly killed Ed has killed Alan. Arnold has survived by not depending on that society and by not yet encountering children with baseball bats. Arnold’s demands are Fierstein’s demands: that each human being show if not love, then respect for others. Torch Song Trilogy brings the audience into Arnold’s home and into his life, demonstrating his absolute humanity. The trilogy shows that the judgments passed by society have been passed because of ignorance. In speaking about gay and lesbian rights, Fierstein has said that no uninvited guest belongs in his bedroom. His trilogy makes the point that those who castigate homosexuals and homosexuality are indeed placing themselves in the bedrooms of others and asks who among these people would invite others into their bedrooms to be judged solely on their private activities therein.

Manny and Jake

This first of the three plays of the Safe Sex trilogy is built on a single line. The line “Can you kiss?” is the source of humor and the source of the ultimate pathos of the play. In Manny and Jake, two attractive young gay men confront, on a level at once simple and profound, the emotional frustration of life in the age of AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).

Manny’s “Can you kiss?” elicits a no-complaints line from Jake. Manny, shown meditating throughout the play, leads Jake and the audience to the conclusion that this most simple and spontaneous act of affection is curtailed by the dread disease. Denied the sweetness of the kiss, Manny (who has found that he is HIV positive) has decided to live his life alone—in meditation.

Safe Sex

Fierstein the comedian is more evident in this play than in the others of the Safe Sex trilogy. However, the basis for the play’s humor, AIDS, is anything but funny. Although Manny and Jake focuses on spontaneity, this second play about Ghee and his partner focuses on protection as it makes the lack of spontaneity the source of its humor.

Ghee has an obsessive-compulsive personality. One of his obsessions is “the list.” He cannot respond in any way to his partner without first checking the list. Once the contents of this list are established, other lists are introduced. The most significant list is one that consists of the names of the disease’s victims. Throughout the play, Ghee and his partner converse while balancing on a teeter-totter. The balancing act of gay men in a sick society is thus set visually as well as conversationally before the eye and the mind of the audience from the play’s beginning to end.

On Tidy Endings

The Safe Sex trilogy closes, as does its predecessor, on the idea of family. It also features two bereaved halves of a couple and a child. As did Widows and Children First!, this play dramatizes the inevitability of the breakup of a family in which one of the partners denies his true identity as a homosexual. In On Tidy Endings, the two “widows” are the two partners, male and female, of the same man. During the course of the play, the man’s child is brought to a better understanding of his father’s final relationship and of his father’s partner. The child’s mother comes to admit her respect for the man who took sole responsibility for her former husband during his debilitating illness. Both mother and son, finally, express admiration for the play’s third surviving character. The ending of the play is tidy, as the three come together to “tidy up” after the passing of the beloved partner and father.

Bibliography

Connema, Richard. “San Francisco’s Torch Song.” Talkin’ Broadway’s Regional News: San Francisco Reviews, June 27, 2000.

Ebert, Roger. “Torch Song Trilogy.” Chicago Sun-Times, December 23, 1988.

Fierstein, Harvey. “His Heart Is Young and Gay.” Interview by Jack Kroll. Newsweek, June 20, 1983.

Fierstein, Harvey. Interview by Harry Stein. Playboy 35 (August, 1988).

Hungerford, Jason. “My Reaction to Torch Song Trilogy.” Pflag-Talk, January 19, 1997.