Arnold and Ed and Laurel and Alan
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

Torch Song
Directed by Moisés Kaufman
Produced by 2nd Stage Theatre

IT’S THE SEASON of gay revivals on Broadway and Off, and the latest is Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song, formerly known as Torch Song Trilogy. The original four-hour production of 1982 has been trimmed into a two-act version under three hours, including intermission. Yet the play still covers the same ground: the travails of Arnold Beckoff, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing and wisecracking drag queen seeking true love.

He finds it, improbably enough, with a straight-acting man at a raunchy bar with a backroom, the International Stud. The only trouble is that Ed, Arnold’s dream man, is engaged to be married to a woman who apparently doesn’t know about Ed’s extracurricular activities.